Ventridens ligera lazarus

Although I've been slow to post lately, I've been busily on the snail. Mostly, right now, I've been scouring the drift materials in the creeks close to my rented room in Ithaca. And though it doesn't do much for locality data it does give me a bumper crop to explore and identify.

Another thing I wanted to do was to start really getting into dissecting so that, when in doubt (*cough succineidae cough*) I could pull out the scalpel, pins, and probe and get to the bottom of things. With that in mind on Monday morning before I left for work (~7am) I dropped a Ventridens ligera (Globose Dome) into a jar of water completely without air bubbles. I went about my day, birding, work, gym, etc and about 10pm I got around to pulling him out for dissection. Sure enough I threw him down in a dissecting tray, walked away for a couple minutes and came back to him right side up. A poke and he was retracted into his shell. Stymied!

I dropped him back in water (so this is about 10:30pm on Monday). Tuesday came and went and I couldn't find time to dissect. Fast forward to a few minutes ago (Wednesday at 10pm) and I looked at the jar, saw the snail really lost most of his color, and figured he had expired. Again I pulled on my gloves and readied my makeshift laboratory (I hope the woman I rent my room from isn't reading my blog because I'm sure snail dissection isn't tops on the list of things she'd like me to be doing in this big manicured house I rent a room in). I placed him on the tray and, sure enough, he retracted in. Curious, I put him under the microscope and could see that he was respirating. This means my little Ventridens ligera (lazarus as a cute  play-- I know he didn't die and come back to life, but I had assumed him dead at one point) had been submerged without oxygen for about 48 hours and has not expired. Seems like a fairly long time to be without oxygen. Me, I tend to not go more than 30 seconds at at time without it. Less if I can help it. One of the many reasons I don't swim: I heart oxygen. But apparently little Lazarus doesn't have fully the same feelings, though I'm sure he'd prefer oxygen to a slow watery death if he could communicate.

Interestingly I collected this little fellow along a railroad track that lies in a definite floodplain. It's a little setback from the Susquehanna River-- too far for the river proper to get to, even in the days before the dike, but the creek systems that pour from the mountains to the river to pass right in the spot and the area is very prone to flooding, particularly in spring. In fact, the road that is right next to this area is often closed due to flooding and on either side of the tracks are pools of water that remain year round and overflow during these periods of flood. Along the tracks I found these snails in abundance alongside an unidentified small succineidae species. Mostly they resided under woody and leafy debris. 

Part of me wanted to see if I left the snail out if he would be able to recover but I dropped him back in water to dissect another day.

Quantifying Color for Crawling Critters

I wanted my next post on this blog to be a  comparative morphology of 3 individuals of Stenotrema hirsutum I have from 3 separate locations, but thinking about this subject brought me to the idea of color.

In my day job as a graphic designer I deal with color quite a bit. I've been fed color theories, color cultural meanings, etc. On top of that, when I used to be a  professional photographer I became well versed in the qualities of light and how they relate to color. So color is no stranger in my world-- one of a visual arts professional.

However, the visual is pretty much what I'm most interested in, not only in my career, but in my hobbies. For instance, I am a birder as one of my main hobbies. And, although I'm well versed enough to know their sounds and able to identify solely using that sense, I never care for only hearing a bird. I always want to see it. Snails also are a visual affair for me. While many people probably have never taken the time to appreciate the very subtle beauty of land snails (sure, maybe some other shells like the fancy Cones I only learned of at the MAM meeting), I find quite a bit of visual intrigue in the the subtle gradation of shell features. Plus I find the live animals just plain cute.

Let's face it, the world, including the malacological world, revolves around the visual uptake of information. Proof is that snails aren't usually described base on their textures (at least not tactually, although texture is described visually, but I've never heard a description of the feeling one gets when touching) , their smells (well, maybe Oxychilius alliarius-- aka the Garlic Snail), or their sounds (unless you went to the MAM meeting the other day).

Before I hit too much of a tangent, the reason for this post is to question some of the whys, why-nots, and methods of thinking about color as it pertains to land snails. There are a few things that strike me about the accounts/data of snails I've been reading in Pilsbry and Burch:

1. The adjectives used to describe are not exact. Maybe their not as bad as walking into a paint store and seeing nonsense names like 'december mist' and 'autumn night,' but their still not very scientifically precise. Words are used like 'cinnamon-buff' and, one I still have no idea what it is, 'horn' are used. Not very quantifiable or reproducible in my mind. 
2. Body color descriptions aren't often given. I think it would help to have body colors included to help speciate a live animal, but often this information is non-existant. 
3. With no exacting data on colors one can't make any postulations based on color. For instance, maybe a link between diet and body color could be made (think Flamingoes and the shrimp they eat). Or habitat and color... or whatever. I'm obviously not a scientist or versed enough in land snails to know if this might be scientifically viable, but I still find this idea stimulating. In birds there is a theory that comes to mind to show, though, that this is likely viable in some way. Unfortunately I don't have the book here in New York with me to quote directly, but, if I remember correctly, the theory says that area that are more wetter and colder have darker, larger individuals of a species while dryer, warmer have smaller, lighter colored birds of a species. And of course there is gradation of the species all in between. (I may have larger and smaller backwards, I'll have to check when I get back to Pennsylvania).

So I feel there is value to a quantifiable, reproducible method for describing color in land snails. Which leads to the next question: What's the best way to describe this color.

Well, it's certainly not 'blue,' 'dark blue,' or 'summer at midnight.' It's best to turn to established color models for the nomenclature.

First, let's buzz through the amateur hour colors of a graphic designer's day. CMYK- no, it's just reflected light, made for what ink can produce. RGB- no it's an additive color model made for what's reproducible on a monitor... no help there.

The color models that really will be helpful and that most graphic designers live in the hazy periphery of are LAB and the Munsell color systems.

Munsell predates the LAB and I believe LAB is just a child of Munsell. I'll leave a wikipedia search for you if you want to find out more. But the main point here is that both are based on the colors that are seeable by the human eye. This would make these ideal methods for describing color, seeing as we'd be hard pressed to find a color not describable by these models, at least, not one we're going to be trying to describe. Side tangent- maybe there are some ultra colors we'd want to describe. Look at crows. To our natural eyes they are just big black birds. But crows actually have an incredible ultraviolet pattern which, apprently, must be seeable by other crows.

Let's go into a few methods I came up that might be viable for your average, everyday snailer to describe color, including their pros and cons.


Method #1: Description By Comparison

The first method that could be useful is comparing a standard color set to the creature. In the graphic design world we use the Pantone color swatches often to make sure inks match up in the printed piece the colors we intended when designing. It's become a standard in the industry. Could we use that same Pantone system for this purpose? Maybe. But limitations include that these swatches only can contain what can be printed (remember, our color models go beyond what ink can do), human error, and the fact that, due to the qualities of light, we would need to make such a comparison in color corrected light so as not to skew the results of the viewer.

Method #2: A Colorimeter

This might be the best method I can think of. While I have experience with a colorimeter for photographic purposes (when I did architectural photography primarily) I have no experience with a full on laboratory colorimeter so I can't speak of its results, how it works, etc. Even Pantone, as mentioned above, has its own colorimeter that, for about $600, you can put up to something and get a color readout. The only potential pitfall (besides price) is that it might not be able to sample extremely small snails. And I have no idea if it reads out colors that are visible by human eye and not reproducible by ink.

Method #3: Photography

Photography is pretty accessible, especially in the digital age. I figure you'd need to take every photo with a color chart and completely correct color balance for consistency. Lighting would also need to be standardized and you would need to light for complete and utter flatness of lighting. Sampling the color from a slight highlight or slight shadow could skew results. Maybe color averages would have to become involved. Then a standardized method would be needed to take those values. Photoshop is pervasive and provides a handy method for this and actually contains pretty much both color models (Munsell is pretty  much the HSB-hue saturation brightness- values). We're still up at a wall against the colors that are reproducible, though.

A couple other points I wanted to make, but I'm tired and need to go to sleep, is some standardization. For instance, for semi-transparent shells do you take the color of the empty shell or with the animal in the shell. And pitfalls include trying to quantify the color of shells that have been sitting for some time and changed colors due to environmental factors.

Well, I've prattled on a bit about this subject and have no answers. I've yet to even do so much as a google search on the subject but liked the idea of thinking it out myself. Further questions remain as to proven/useful methods and viable use of the data to both scientists and enthusiasts such as myself. Really, as I started to think out the table of characteristics of my 3 Stenotrema hirsutum I became hung up on the thought of how to best describe the shell and body colors in a scientifically accurate and reproducible manner. Of course, I'll probably still describe my S. hirsutum in the same manner as Pilsbry with colors like 'cinnamon-buff' and 'clay.' Stay tuned for that article.

Punctum minutissimum : Small Spot

Right before I left Pennsylvania I decided to grab some photos of micro snails I found in the soil sample from before the snowfall. The soil sample came from the mountain bike path side of Frances Slocum State Park and yielded about 20 or so micro snail individuals. The above snail, is Punctum minutissimum, commonly called Small Spot.

This little fellow photographed measures a mere 1.09mm. If remember correctly, the umbilicus measures 0.28ish mm, but I am definitely sure that the umbilicus is contained about 3.8 times in the diameter (that math adds up). Everything pretty much jives with Pilsbry's opening paragraph about this creature:

The shell is very minute, depressed conoid, umbilicate, the umbilicus contained about 3.7 times in the diameter; thin, of corneous or very light brown tint, somewhat translucent, shining. Initial 1 1/2 whorls smooth, the rest sculptured with  close, somewhat unequal very delicate striae in the direction of the growth lines...

The only other known Punctidae known in the state of PA is Punctum vitreum. Size seems to overlap, but P. minutissimum is slightly smaller. A key difference seems to be that P. vitreum has the widest ribs of the Punctidae (dlia.org landsnail.pdf which I'm pissed because they took their snail pages offline, I should have crawled the site and saved it, but the pdf is still available if you can find it and it has pretty much all the info anyway). Another interesting tidbit from Pilsbry:

 Under the binocular, P. minutissimum looks as if it were molded out of bronze , but P. vitreum appears as if it was cut from yellowish crystal.

On a personal note, I'm still having a tough time with micro snails. My microscope is 40x and so I really can't get fine sculpture when looking through. But snapping a photo helps as I can zoom in a little more. Another problem is just handling them-- as evidenced by the photos in this post. I have to come up with systems to better handle my micro snails. I've already lost some interesting snails, for instance, crushing a shell which was either a Columella species or immature Ventricosa or Gastrocopta species. Very disappointed by that one. For someone who's very coordinated when it comes to things like sports and dancing, I turn into a proverbial bull in a china shop when micro snails are involved.

Range maps from Land Snails of Limestone Communities and Update of Land Snail Distributions in Pennsylvania (Pearce) with my Luzerne county added to range (in orange). Formerly unknown to Luzerne County.

The Future of My Snailing

The one thing I like about snailing Luzerne County, Pennsylvania is that it is an understudied area. All my findings seem very valuable in my eyes because there really aren't a lot of records from the county. In fact, as I leaf through Pilsbry, my county seems very rarely represented in mentions about species, even those that are known to occur in surrounding counties. My county is left blank in many of the Hubricht maps. It's kind of like my own way of feeling like a pioneer. I'm in mostly uncharted territory.

However, in a week I begin my new job at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology as Interactive Web Designer for the Citizen Science Department. In such an area, where scientists abound, is it already well scoured? Will it be harder to find shells because there are more collectors? Is my beginner's knowledge and elbow grease much less valuable in the situation? Maybe, who knows. I won't know until I get up there and can start sniffing around for these answers.

But a more positive way of thinking about it is that I may be able to find someone to apprentice. Let's face it, right now, I'm practically an island when it comes to snailing. I really have nothing but some books well older than me (and in some respects outdated due to changes in taxonomy, etc) to try to parse and hope I'm correct. It might be nice to have someone to correct my mistakes in real time and offer insight. At the very least I'll have the Cornell library and can hopefully find all the articles that I've wanted but have yet been able to procure.

I'll still actually be in Luzerne County most weekends. However, I don't foresee a ton of time to devote to birding/snailing when I'm here. Of course, I'm sure I'll be able to steal a little time here and there.

A couple asides:

Besides the Anguispira I seem to have a litter of Zonitoides nitidus!

Also, I'm pleased that I've resumed work on my land snail iPhone app. I'm still researching all the species (which I've expanded to all of the northeast- from PA to ME). I'm also including snails that are known to the norther counties of MD, DE, and WV as they seem like they are at least hypothetical to the range.

It's a Boy! (and a girl)

Okay, so snails (well most land snails) are hermaphroditic— I can't really pick out a color for the walls—but what you're seeing above are freshly hatched snails. I found a large clutch of eggs when I was cleaning out my terrarium to combat mites and so removed them to a couple separate petri dishes. It seems the petri dish that stayed dryer is first to have hatches, with one individual hatching a day ago and the rest following suit a day later.

There are only a handful of possibilities for what these little snails will become based on what is in the terrarium. It holds the following species: Stenotrema hirsutum(1), Ventridens ligera (3, maybe 4 but one really doesn't "measure up"), Xolotrema denotata(2 but I doubt have reached sexual maturity as I found them a few months ago still without identifiable characteristics), Novisuccinea ovalis(1), Anguispira alternata(1), Triodopsis tridenata (1, but very new to the tank, can't remember if came before eggs), and, my top contender for what these babies are, Neohelix dentifera(1).

UPDATE: As you can see by the laconic comment below, these snails are likely the Anguispira alternata. I was so focused on how big I thought the eggs were that it had to be the largest snail in my tank but you can see how these little guys look like they grow into ribbed adults and have color blotches a la Anguispira alternata. Learning experience!! I would never make such a bad call birding, fixating on one criterion. Proof positive that inexperience is definitely a detriment. The only solution: work my ass off to get experience.

As time goes on, I'll find the answer. An interesting characteristic is that the snails have two transverse bands of dark color towards the end of their body whorl. And, for scale, I should mention that they average about 2.35mm in width.

Currently I also have another polygyrid waiting to grow into identification that has periostracal structures, so I've got a lot to look forward to. Yes, I'm a total nerd. But I'm a sexy nerd.

More Photography of Stenotrema hirsutum

I needed to take some time off of web and app development tonight so I decided I'd do a little photo shoot. I chose to photograph a Stenotrema hirsutum I found at Nescopeck. The problem with  Stenotrema, as I see it, is that you can't fully tell if the shell is empty. I left it with a couple shells I had in a little petri dish and when I went back into my office I found it hanging from the top of the lid. Empty shells don't generally do that.

Anyway, as an aside, I'll mention here that I launched my new website tekbirdr.com. It's for app development and digital media publishing of nature subjects. 

Above is my favorite photo from the ones I took. An interesting thing to note is that this S. hirsutum, along with a second, which I found at Nescopeck are a darker brown than the one I found at Frances Slocum (other side of the county). Also the body color is more gray on the other snail. Maybe these are two different species and one isn't S. hirsutum at all, let's face it, I'm still a neophyte. But they both are the same size and whorls and pretty much seem the same. I'll put more effort into comparing both live individuals at a later date. For reference there is a photo of the other S. hirsutum here.

I also drew the snail's ventral view. I really should make a comparative drawing of the Frances Slocum individual and look for any differences, but, honestly, I'm just feeling tired and lazy from working so much and not sleeping well this week. I'll do it some other day and post a comparison. But, as I look at my drawing while I type, I pretty much remember the same characteristics.

A Big Mystery

Through some good fortune the large storm that dumped snow over much of the east coast stayed to our east and left us with relatively snow free ground. So during the holiday break I went to Nescopeck State Park to do a little combo snailing/birding. Birding was absolutely dead. I had hoped for winter finches like Redpolls and Siskin, but arrived to find the feeders empty, as was much of the park. With bird life at nil, I turned my attention fully to snails.

Overall I was very pleased with my snailing. I found my very first Vitrina angelicae (Eastern Glass-Snail) shell sitting in a pile of leaves on top of a flat rock. I also found some Triodopsis tridentata and a couple Stenotrema  hirsutum. Another interesting find was a 6 whorled heliciform shell that doesn't match up with anything in my database (the one I built for my iphone app), so I'll have to look into more.

Most importantly I was pretty excited to find what is my largest land snail yet. The above picture is of that snail. The shell was in/under a log that looked like it  had a hole for some rodent. My best guess is that this fellow became dinner. But luckily, there seems to be enough information left in the shell to make an identification.

First, obviously, we can say it's heliciform (72 matches). The width measure 28.4mm (11 matches) and it is imperforate (6 matches) with a reflected lip(5 matches). No teeth are present(this has 3 options- no teeth, teeth and teeth sometimes present- it always pulls the sometimes matches plus the yes or no depending on input). Plugging that into my app, I came up with 3 suspects: Mesodon zaletus, Neohelix albolabris, and Webbhelix multilineata.

From there it's time to take to Pilsbry but not before first taking a look in the microscope for any microsculpture I could glean (unfortuneately I haven't 100% finished to database for things like striae, puncta, etc.) . But there is what seems to be some crucial evidence-- indented radial striae.

Regarding microsculpture and the aforementioned snails according to Pilsbry:

Mesodon zaletus:

Later whorls with sculpture of fine oblique striae and microscopic spiral lines, which are typically rather weak or subobsolete, but sometimes distinct.

Neohelix albolabris:

Later whorls with sculpture of fine oblique striae and minute, crowded, incised spiral lines.

Webbhelix multilineata:

... the rest with fine sculpture of oblique striae, rather weak spiral engraved lines in their intervals.

Here is the microsculpture.

There seems to be no mention of the spiral lines being indented with Mesodon zaletus. Webbhelix multilineata usually has color bands (although Pilsbry mentions a mutation known as Webbhelix multilineata mut. alba that is bandless and can occur with the banded shell populations). However, I believe the description of 'crowded, incised spiral lines' sees to hit the mark.

So, I believe this mystery solved. It is the snail Neohelix albolabris (common name, Whitelip).