Tom,

I've found some other species I left in my aquarium behind it after more than one month too. I was
surprised about these plicata since they have been through a lot to get here. Airplanes storage
rooms can get really cold, then they went to very hot places later.

Too bad paranoid customs took away your mass destruction weapons, I mean, you shells! Until now the
only place customs took some shells from me was in NZ, where they saw land shells on my luggage
(cleaned, in zip lock bags with labels) and said they had to fumigate them to eliminate any "Ebola
Virus" or whatever they were afraid of.

Marcus



There have actually been a number of studies on the ability of nerites to
withstand lengthy periods out of water.  Fischer (1965) found that the
animals initially lost about 5-10% of their body weight per day when kept
out of water.  After a few days this rate slows down to less that 1% per
day.  The record survival time was Nerita versicolor at 82 days, followed by
Nerita pelonronta at 77 days (an earlier study by Mattox, 1949), Nerita
plicata at 68 days, and Nerita albicilla at 21 days (other species were all
in the couple of days to one week or so range).  In general, the higher on
the rock a nerite typically lives, the longer it can remain out of water.
Those that live in the splash zone can only last a few days out of water.
I once had a rather large parcel of freshwater nerites sent to me from the
Philippines.  They were not cleaned as I wanted to confirm the opercs to the
individual specimens.  They had sat for 30 in the Philippines prior to
shipment but had not dried out due to humidity.  By the time they arrived in
the US the package was at the high point of the odor familiar to us all. The
US Agricultural Department confiscated the box claiming I was trying to
import live snails without a permit.  Of course, while there may have been
live maggots in the box, I doubt any of the nerites were alive.  In any case
I was visited by a couple of shield waving Ag cops and had to explain why I
was having the nerites sent to me and swear (literally and in writing) that
I wasn't trying to bring in live snails.  I never got the snails.  One
person said they were destroyed while another said they were sent to the
Smithsonian for identification.  Hope they liked my nerites!
Tom Eichhorst in New Mexico, USA


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