Dear all:

Andrew brought up some good points about the collection of land snails.
They are indeed easily found, at least the larger species.  And private
collectors should be encouraged to collect as much as they are willing to
collect.  Precise locality and dates of collection are needed to document
the existence and/or disappearance of these species.  The occurences of
imported snails are important as well.

Two problems:  A good 70% of just about any land snail fauna in the eastern
US consists of micros....species under 5 mm in diameter.  These can only be
documented efficiently by collecting soil and leaf litter samples from
appropriate habitats, then after drying the sample, sorting through it
under a microscope.  The documentation of the occurence of a large species
is better than nothing, but documentation of 20 species is much better.
However, this process takes time and is usually only persued by purists.

Alabama has had a long history of very good terrestrial and freshwater
malacologists.....this continues today.  Other states have not been so
lucky.  For much of, say Georgia (and I'm not picking on Georgia, most of
the country is the same), we would have to start the initial documentation
now because most of the state has never been sampled.  We could extrapolate
what damages have occurred through these initial samples, but much would be
educated speculation .....but, again, better than nothing.

I'm not advocating throwing our hands up, saying it's too late, and heading
to the nearest tavern to drown our sorrows (hey, that's not a bad
idea....the nearest tavern part)......I'm just saying that the amount of
work is immense.  The sooner we start, the better.  It's a long row to hoe,
but much can be learned.

To answer Andrew's question....yes, this collecting by private collectors
does a lot of good.  There are very, very few professionals out there and
those precious few need all the help they can get.  Document localities and
dates of collection and get the specimens to the nearest natural history
museum with an active malacological program.  If the information is
published in a report, who knows what land can be saved from bulldozers and
chain saws?

Kurt

>
>We have a pretty good guide to land snails and their distribution within
>Alabama ca. 1910, when the state still had extensive tracts of virgin forest
>and pesticides were not widely applied. I have often thought that the
>distribution of land snails today would make an excellent indicator of
>environmental change since then. Land snails are easy to collect, and for
>many (not all) species a dead shell is sufficient for identification. It
>would be beneficial for collectors to accumulate information on them,
>especially if the collections were labeled carefully with accurate dates and
>localities, and with ecologic notes such as "found in oak leaf litter" or
>"on limestone". When collecting fossils, I often gather a few dead snail
>shells along with the fossils and sort them out later, just so there will be
>a museum somewhere with a few snails collected during this decade. But
>that's probably just a few of the larger and more conspicuous species.
>
>I never collect ALL the dead shells, since they form a neat little ecologic
>niche in themselves and surely some small creatures depend on them for
>laying eggs, hiding, resting, etc. And I don't collect the live ones at all,
>though this would have to be done for a serious collection.
>
>Is this sort of collecting doing any good, Kurt? At least I'm getting
>familiar with the snails' shapes; some are quite elegant. Should private
>collectors be encouraged to work on land snails near their homes? It would
>certainly save them a lot of dive money.
>
>Andrew K. Rindsberg
>Geological Survey of Alabama
>