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Settin' a spell after doing some yard work and playing with dogs and such. For the beer fans, I'm drinking a Sierra Nevada Summerfest.
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Settin' a spell after doing some yard work and playing with dogs and such. For the beer fans, I'm drinking a Sierra Nevada Summerfest.
( Read more... )
100 Species #18: English garden snail
Mar. 30th, 2011 05:48 pm
A sleepy English garden snail (Cepaea nemoralis) cringes against the cold.
I wasn't sure this yard would have them--they are very common in Brookline and Brighton, but the further you get from the city the more rare they seem to be. It will be interesting to see if our affection for this animal will come into conflict with our new roles as gardeners. This little one's shell will grow to be about four times this size--perhaps 2 cm in diameter. This is a typical pattern, but the species is extremely variable, as can be seen in this fun post. This was also featured as 365 Urban Species #144.
Urban Nature Pictures 6/1
Jun. 1st, 2010 08:41 pm
I stopped to take a picture of an English garden snail. Then I found another. Then Alexis found a couple more. Then we had eleven snails on the wall, and six of them converged at the edge for some mysterious reason.
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cottonmanifestoUrban species #144: English garden snail Cepaea nemoralis
Life began in the oceans. Only a few phyla have left the safety of the water to have some live on land--the arthropods, the chordates (that's us), several worm phyla, and perhaps most improbably, the mollusks. Mollusks are slime-secreting lumps of muscle that (in most cases) live in a shell of calcium carbonate. Most classes of mollusks still live in the water--bivalves such as clams and oysters, cephalopods like octopi and squids--but some gastropods, slugs and snails, have crawled their way to land.
Some species of gastropods have become urban animals, at least in damp cities. In Boston, New York, and other northern and eastern cities, the urban snail is the English garden snail. This common name is one I have given it, unsatisfied with the established monikers "grovesnail," and "brown-lipped snail." This snail, or more likely its eggs, probably found its way to North America on plants shipped from the UK. This herbivorous animal is considered a garden pest by some, but may charm others with its colorful shell. In fact, its highly variable shell colors and patterns are a matter for a considerable amount of scientific studies. Evolutionary biologists consider Cepaea's shell pattern diversity to be a good illustration of genetic drift.
The brown garden snail Helix aspersa of mainland Europe, was deliberately introduced to San Francisco, with the intention of raising it as a food animal. One suspects that this adventure can be added to the embarrassing American record of unsuccessful industries based on introduced species, such as silk, carp, and nutria.
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