A Guide to Land Snails of Australia

By John Stanisic, Darryl Potter and Lorelle Stanisic

Australia's native land snails are an often-overlooked invertebrate group that forms a significant part of terrestrial biodiversity, with an estimated 2500 species present in Australia today.

A Guide to Land Snails of Australia is an overview of Australia's native and introduced land snail faunas, offering a greater understanding of their role in the natural environment. The book presents clear diagnostic features of live snails and their shells, and is richly illustrated with a broad range of Australia's native snail, semi-slug and slug species. Comprehensive coverage is also included of the many exotic species introduced to Australia.

In a unique bioregional approach, the reader is taken on a trek through some of Australia's spectacular regional landscapes, highlighting their endemic and special snail faunas. This section is supplemented with key localities where species can be found.

Certificate of Commendation, The Royal Zoological Society of NSW 2023 Whitley Awards: Zoology Guide

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Jul 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781486313549

John Stanisic

Dr John Stanisic, OAM, is Australia's foremost authority on land snails. An Honorary Research Fellow at the Queensland Museum, John has described more than 400 new species.

Book preview

A GUIDE TO LAND SNAILS OF AUSTRALIA

Dedicated to the memory of the late American malacologist Dr Alan Solem.

title

© John Stanisic, Darryl Potter and Lorelle Stanisic 2022

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO Publishing for all permission requests.

John Stanisic, Darryl Potter and Lorelle Stanisic assert their right to be known as the authors of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

ISBN: 9781486313525 (pbk)

ISBN: 9781486313532 (epdf)

ISBN: 9781486313549 (epub)

How to cite:

Stanisic J, Potter D, Stanisic L (2022) A Guide to Land Snails of Australia. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.

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Front cover (clockwise from top): Meliobba shafferyi (photo by Tim Hawkes), Triboniophorus graeffei (photo from the authors’ collection), Rhagada perprima (photo by Vince Kessner), Triboniophorus graeffei (photo from the authors’ collection).

Back cover (left to right): Leptopoma perlucida (photo by Neil Hewitt), Kimberleytrachia canopi, Amplirhagada boongareensis (photos by Vince Kessner).

Page 58: Photo from Hallan A, Fukuda H (2015) Taiwanassiminea phantasma n. sp.: a terrestrial assimineid (Caenogastropoda: Truncatelloidea) from Middle Osborn Island, Kimberley, Western Australia. Molluscan Research 35. Copyright © The Malacological Society of Australasia and the Society for the Study of Molluscan Diversity, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The Malacological Society of Australasia and the Society for the Study of Molluscan Diversity.

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Mar22_01

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface: A snail whisperer’s odyssey

Introduction

1: The discovery and study of Australia’s native land snails

2: Land snail form and function

3: Land snail behaviour

4: Snails in the environment

5: Identification of land snails

6: Australian native land snail families

7: Snails introduced to Australia

8: Regional land snail faunas

9: Collecting land snails

10: Human uses of land snails

Appendix: Classification of Australia’s land snails

Glossary

References

Further reading

Index

The Keeled Spinifex Snail, Rhagada dampierana (SD 15–22 mm), is an atypical strongly sculptured and flat-spired member of a diverse group of spinifex snails. This species lives on Rosemary Island, Dampier Archipelago, north-western Western Australia. Photo: Vince Kessner.

The Everard Ranges Dwarfmelon, Sinumelon pedasum (SD 17–33 mm), has a wide distribution in Australia’s Red Centre. The Red Centre encompasses areas of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory and is home to many and varied species of land snail. Photo: Vince Kessner.

Acknowledgements

This guidebook is a tribute to the many land snail workers that have made Australian land snail research the taxonomic force that it is today. Their collective efforts have been crucial to the production of this guide. From the single species description to the overarching monograph, all contributions have played a part in its genesis.

We are grateful to all those authors (past and present) whose publications we have used to provide information for this book. Some of these have been specifically referenced, but there are many more that have been omitted from the reading list. To list them all would possibly have doubled the final size of the guide.

The many exquisite images of live snails utilised will make this publication a worthy member of the extensive CSIRO library of guidebooks to Australia’s unheralded invertebrate fauna. We would personally like to thank Vince Kessner (Adelaide River, Northern Territory) and Tony Robinson (Sturt, South Australian Museum) for the kind use of many of their images to showcase the beauty of Australian land snails. Thanks also to Adnan Moussalli, Corey Whisson, Tim Hawkes and Neil Hewitt, who have donated images for use herein.

This guidebook has largely been produced on the back of Australian Land Snails, Volumes 1 and 2 (Stanisic et al. 2010, 2018) and would not have been completed without reference to these volumes. For that we would like to thank two co-authors on the field guide project: first, Michael Shea who templated the family treatments as well as writing some of the general text, and, second, Owen Griffiths who financed the project at significant personal expense. And thanks also to the two chief photographers on the field guide project, Des Beechey and Vince Railton. Their many fine shell images provided a comprehensive guide to identification of the species.

We also like to acknowledge the Board of the Queensland Museum for allowing this project to be completed on the South Bank campus and for the use of the museum’s facilities.

Finally, we would like to thank Mark Hamilton, Development Editor, CSIRO Publishing for his attention to detail in grammar and for guiding us through the many manuscript publishing protocols. His efforts have made this handbook a much more enjoyable and readable item. Any lingering errors in fact remain the sole responsibility of the authors.

Preface: A snail whisperer’s odyssey

Australia’s native land snail fauna is poorly known by the public whose rather negative perception of land snails chiefly revolves around the small number of introduced species inhabiting urban backyards. However, personal experience has shown that when confronted by the diversity, sheer number and beauty of Australia’s native species, people are keen to learn more about these fascinating creatures – even more so when they discover that, instead of eating their garden plants, the native species feed on fungi, lichen and other biofilm and play an important role in the health of Australia’s forests.

My journey in the world of land snails began in 1978 at the Australian Museum in Sydney, New South Wales, under the aegis of renowned international malacologist, Dr Winston Ponder. Knowing almost nothing about the subject, I was employed (‘tossed in the deep end’, you might say) to curate the Australian Museum’s vast land snail collections. Amidst an extensive variety of worldwide land snails amassed by such notables as James Cox, John Brazier, Charles Hedley and Tom Iredale, I quickly accrued knowledge of land snail species and, more significantly, museum curatorial procedure.

After this relatively short apprenticeship of barely 2 years, much to my amazement, I was appointed Curator of Molluscs at the Queensland Museum in January 1980. In contrast to the rich history of land snail royalty at the Australian Museum, the Queensland Museum had virtually no history of land snail collecting or research. Consequently, beginning in 1980, a program of fieldwork was initiated whereby more than 2000 collecting sites in eastern Australia were investigated over the following 26 years. The area covered in this odyssey extended from the Torres Strait islands to the Victorian Border and ~300–400 km inland. As a result, the Queensland Museum land snail collections increased from just over 10 000 specimens to more than 200 000 specimens. Darryl Potter, who was my assistant during the 26 years of my curatorship at the museum, was my companion during much of this fieldwork.

From the late 1990s, the Queensland Museum collections, together with those at the Australian Museum, were gradually but slowly databased as resources became available. For identification purposes, all the undescribed species in the collections were assigned alphanumeric descriptors based on a regional coding system. Remarkably, by the early 2000s almost 900 species in the collections had been identified as new to science! This number was almost double the number of previously described species from the eastern Australian region and greater than the sum total of known species for all of Australia. To date, more than 400 new species have been described from these collections with an estimated 450 putative species still remaining in the Queensland Museum without names. And many more are yet to be discovered!

I left the Queensland Museum in 2006 to pursue a career in private consultancy where I utilised land snails as key indicator species in environmental assessment. Land snails as surrogates for all invertebrates are indicators of biodiversity hotspots and ecosystem health more so than their vertebrate counterparts. With the downturn in the mining boom in Queensland, consultancy work slowly dried up and I returned to the museum as Honorary Research Fellow to continue my research activities in land snails.

From those formative days at the Australian Museum when I became ‘hooked’ on land snails, it became my intention to produce an illustrated guide to the entire Australian land snail fauna. In August 2010, the first part of this goal was realised with the publication of Australian Land Snails Volume 1. A Field Guide to Eastern Australian Species in conjunction with Michael Shea, Owen Griffiths (both Australian Museum, Sydney) and Darryl Potter (Stanisic et al. 2010). This was the first colour-illustrated guide to the east Australian land snail fauna since James Cox’s 1868 A Monograph of Australian Land Shells (Cox 1868). When, in conjunction with the same authors, Australian Land Snails Volume 2. A Field Guide to Southern, Central and Western Species was completed eight years later (Stanisic et al. 2018), a career-long ambition was fulfilled.

Far from being the endpoint in my publication career, these two volumes sparked an idea to produce a smaller, compact handbook guide featuring Australia’s land snails and some little known but interesting facts about their general biology and lifestyles. However, the enthusiasm and singular motivation for writing this guide stems from the general public’s eagerness to learn more about land snails.

To this day, my passion for collecting and researching Australia’s native land snails has never diminished and my fascination with these amazing creatures has never waned. My only hope is that in this guide I can convey some of this passion and fascination to you.

John Stanisic OAM

‘The Snail Whisperer’

The Snail Whisperer. A bronze sculpture by Pete Smit, Cobble Cast Australia. Photo: Gary Cranitch.

Introduction

The native Australian land snail fauna is numerous and diverse. Two recently produced field guides (Stanisic et al. 2010, 2018) illustrated over 1500 species. With an estimated 750-odd undescribed species still in state museum collections and many more yet to be found, it is envisaged that the final number of species will exceed 2500. Australia’s land snails inhabit virtually all parts of the continent, including most near-shore islands and those more remotely removed such as Lord Howe Island, Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands and the subantarctic Macquarie Island. One notable exception to their occupancy are the sandy deserts of Australia’s interior.

While Australia’s native snails prefer moisture-laden habitats such as the tropical, subtropical and temperate rainforests of the eastern seaboard, their existence in drier habitats is also a characteristic of the fauna. Dry rainforest such as vine thickets supports extensive snail communities in the semi-arid Brigalow country of inland Queensland and New South Wales. In extremely dry parts of the continent such as the Red Centre and Pilbara region of Western Australia, rock outcrops enable snails to eke out a living albeit within a strict survival regime.

The wide geographical range of the Australian land snail fauna is equalled only by the wide diversity of shell design that is extensive both between and within families. A striking example is seen in the family Caryodidae where the Giant Panda-snail, Hedleyella falconeri, has a large bulimoid shell but has as its close relatives the flat-coiled snails of the genus Pedinogyra. Similarly, the family Helicarionidae comprises both typically shelled glass-snails together with semi-slugs that have very reduced ear-shaped shells. The speciose Camaenidae (forest, woodland and rock snails) and Charopidae (pinwheel snails) account for almost half of all currently known species and display a seemingly endless variety of shell shapes and shell sculptures.

Shell-less snails (slugs) are rare in the Australian fauna. The native slug fauna comprises the endemic Cystopeltidae (humpback slugs) with four species, the Athoracophoridae with a single species (Red-triangle Slug) and the Rathouisiidae (prism slugs) also with a single species. All of these slugs are restricted to the moist rainforests of the eastern seaboard.

The caryodid Hedleyella falconeri, Giant Panda-snail (SH to 90 mm), is Australia’s largest land snail and lives in the moist rainforests of north-eastern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland.

The native Red-triangle Slug, Triboniophorus graeffei (length to 100 mm), comes in many colour forms. This golden variety inhabits Mt Superbus, south-east Queensland.

This guide

The publication of the two somewhat hefty field guides (Stanisic et al. 2010, 2018) has paved the way for an opportunity to produce this more general guidebook to Australia’s native land snails, their diversity and their role in the Australian environment. In contrast to the structured nature of the two field guides, this guidebook is a more entertaining overview of Australia’s native land snail fauna through a short introduction to the many aspects of their natural history, biology and classification. A guide to the families of Australia’s native snails presents diagnostic features of live snails and their shells in an easy-to-understand way to assist with their identification. A comprehensive coverage of introduced families deals with the many exotic species acquired by Australia since foundation. For those snailers new to snail diagnostics, a pictorial guide to the common shell shapes of families is provided. In a unique bioregional approach to snail identification, the reader is taken on a trek through some of Australia’s spectacular regional landscapes, highlighting their endemic and special snail faunas. The captions to the images in this section include the key localities in which species can be found specifically to enable the keen naturalist to observe these creatures in the wild. The initial intention was to provide distribution maps, but these have not been included due to the very localised nature of most species.

The shells of most land snails are intrinsically beautiful but so are the live snails. Accordingly, the guide is richly illustrated with a broad range of Australia’s native snail species in living colour to help the reader fully appreciate these wonderful creatures. Live animal images have been preferred over shells in most instances, a feature that separates this guide from any of its predecessors. Captions for many of the live images include the locality of origin where possible and the average shell measurements (SD, shell diameter; SH, shell height) to further assist with identification.

Wakefield’s Miniature Treesnail, Elasmias wakefieldiae (SH 2.9 mm). A tiny arboreal species living on the leaves of trees in rainforests of north-eastern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland. Not the smallest of the Australian land snails!

The Australian native land snail fauna is, except for a few widely ranging species, wholly endemic. There is also a cohort of species, introduced following European settlement, that inhabit urban gardens and otherwise disturbed environments such as orchards and farmlands. Among these are a small number of serious pest species whose impact will be briefly discussed in more detail in the family treatments.

An unfortunate but unavoidable shortcoming in a guidebook of this size is that only a small proportion of Australia’s land snail fauna can be presented and discussed. Every attempt has been made to illustrate as many of the species as possible and the coverage should allow a full appreciation of these oft-overlooked terrestrial invertebrate creatures. Land snails form a significant part of the 99 per cent of terrestrial fauna that does not comprise vertebrates (Stanisic and Ponder 2004). Readers seeking more detailed information on the Australian land snail fauna are referred to Stanisic et al. (2010, 2018).

1: The discovery and study of Australia’s native land snails

An historical account

Australian land snail discoveries and studies are book-marked by several significant events and publications that have their origins in the early part of the nineteenth century. The following is a synoptic account of the studies that have led to the documentation of Australia’s land snail fauna. Stanisic et al. (2010, 2018) give a more detailed account.

The early period of study covered a time of European voyages of discovery by French and British parties principally concerned with mapping, surveying and collecting