#tiny snail

Rarity is wearing a tiny snail.

(Hope I am not annoying with the multiple requests ^-^" also didn't know if I should request them all together or alone, thought each as one alone might be better for keeping track)

Animal of the day: Desmoulin's whorl snail !

Whorl snails are tiny terrestrial molluscs found in wetlands across Europe. The latin name of this species is Vertigo moulinsiana, named after the French naturalist Charles des Moulins. They are certainly very cute :)

Their shells grow up to 2.6mm long, made up of 4-5 curling structures known as whorls, hence why they are called whorl snails ! The shells are more pointy when they are young, but as they grow up they become more rounded. Like most snails they are hermaphrodites (they produce both types of gametes) and reproduce by exchanging gametes or self-fertilisation.

Their tiny size means they cannot travel far on their own, but research has found that they can float on water currents and attach themselves to larger animals which enables them to colonise larger ranges.

Due to draining of water sources and land use change, whorl snails are classified as a vulnerable or even endangered species on the IUCN Red List. We must protect wetland habitats to keep these little guys safe :(

Found in the spoilheap of a Greenhead Pony Ant nest - just one species in an entire superfamily of tiny air-breathing snails - those are grains of sand around it.

Also known as Pupa strangei (Chrysalis Snails being the common name for some of the species in the superfamily), Australbinula strangeana, Gastrocopta strangeana, and Gyrodaria strangeana. I haven't been able to find out who 'Strange' was.

The genus Gastrocopta was first described by Thomas Vernon Wollaston in 1878, and now has over 100 known species - many long extinct, and particularly diverse in the Miocene of Europe. The entire family is now extinct in Europe since the Pleistocene, with a single exception in the Northern Caucasus. One Gastrocoptid, Dentisphaera maxema, is known only from caves in northern Vietnam. Some species live in deserts.

Wollaston himself (b.1822–d.1878) was an English entomologist and conchologist who wrote extensively about the beetles and land snails of Madeira and elsewhere, and whose book ‘On the Variation of Species,’ predated Darwin's paper on the ‘Origin of Species’ by three years. The two men were well acquainted, but Darwin had a lot of biologist friends - the infamous Richard Owen being the only notable exception.