Banded Snails

[Amy]

(Sorry if this website has already been shared among theese forums)
But I was looking around the internet at banded snails and came across this website, it is generally FULL of information about the banded snails shells, it also has beautiful pictures, diagrams which i find fascinating and a video. Sorry if this site has already been posted but i found it really intresting
www.molluscs.at/gastropoda/terrestrial/banded_snails.html

[slackie]

Hi, those are Cepaea hortensis, aren´t they? In my language they are called páskovka, it means something like banded-one
Round mine there are lots of them. It has rained this afternoons so I had to ride my bike zig-zag-like not to kill some of those . When I was young I used to go everytime after rain out with a bucket and I picked the most beautiful ones . Really beautiful snails.
I am just sorry that in my backyards there are just banded ones. There are also less yellow ones but I have found orange ones just twice in my life, when I was around 6 years old...
And, yeah, it´s pretty easy to keep them

[Robert Nordsieck]

Hi there,

@ Amy: Thank you very much for your friendly comment. I am quite happy to hear that, because that is my site ;D

@ slackie: The snails described are Cepaea hortensis as well as Cepaea nemoralis - Those came later, because I began the page in Vienna, where there are no Cepaea nemoralis.

There are more banded snails on my site, only they are mentioned on the side, because their bands and colours are not that interesting. Those are Cepaea vindobonensis from Vienna to the east and Cepaea silvatica in Switzerland.


Cepaea hortensis and Cepaea vindobonensis

Those should also be the two species present in Moravia, though I am not certain about Cepaea vindobonensis, the distribution map (from the 80s) says about middle of the former CSSR, I do not know exactly how far into today's Czech republic this species is present.

Interestingly enough the evolution megalab has yielded the result that generally there are more yellow specimens of banded snails today, because it gets warmer and there is less vegetation.

The diagrams, as you can see, do not fully agree. Nor do our findings, my friend from Berlin says she keeps finding brown ones and I keep finding banded yellow ones and pink ones here in Luebeck (German northern Baltic Sea coast).

So that's statistics then...

Kind regards
Robert

[slackie]

Wow! I´d like to know so much about them as you do!
Cepaea nemoralis lives here as well, it interbreeds with C. hortensis (as far as I know )... But I haven´t seen Cepaea vindobonensis round here yet. Maybe they live at the border with Slovakia (south-east corner of CR), that used to be the middle of CSSR, as you say. I´ll ask my auntie and try to find some, if I go there

[Robert Nordsieck]

Hi slackie,

dekuji I have been doing this for like 20 years... Some knowledge was bound to come

Anyway, I checked with Kerney, Cameron, Jungbluth (1983), also with www.animalbase.uni-goettingen.de/zooweb/servlet/AnimalBase/home/species?id=1653, but was not able to find conclusive data as the where to find the species in the Czech republic.

The distribution map in Kerney at al. states a distribution about all of Slovakia (but the map does not give the border between the two countries) and also a distribution in the northwestern center of the Czech republic. I enclose the distribution map, do not own a scanner, which is why I had to photograph it.

Kind regards
Robert

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[slackie]

20 years?!?! You must know everything about them then!
Tank you very much for the map, it seems very interesting. Now I am wondering why does C. vindobonensis live *just* where the map shows: I can´t see any logic in it. Slovakia is quite hilly country and the east part of CR too- BUT the second smaller location in CR is mostly lowland... So how?
All i know is that they don´t live here, I live exactly in the tiny white area between those two big orange ones in CR

[Robert Nordsieck]

Jul 15, 2011 17:38:06 GMT slackie said:

20 years?!?! You must know everything about them then!

Hi slackie,
no, I wouldn't say that. I come from a snail scientist family, so I had best insights in my early youth (which is more than 20 years ago *hint*). But really reading and writing about snails is something I do since my studies in the 90s. But my dad and my grandpa know / knew much more about snails. I am the smallest

But the recent years have been quite interesting, with the evolution megalab and counting snails and their colour patterns Also, I like banded snails very much, they are much more agile than Roman snails, for example. But they are quite disagreeable creatures when mating - they BITE each other!!! We had a banded snail once who had hurt its shell, but was able to repair it. It was then called Quasimodo, because it had a bit of a hunchback appearance...

As to the distribution throughout the Czech Republic, Cepaea vindobonensis is usually a grassland / shrubland species, not exactly a mountain species.

It is quite possible that the species has at one point been introduced to the northwest of Bohemia and spread out from there. And the main distribution area ends with what today is the border. There are also similar distribution fields in Poland. And in Germany, Cepaea vindobonensis had only been introduced at one place in Bavaria, together with other Austrian species.

But there are very good Czech malacologists, I could try and ask one of them, or some contacts in Vienna, let's see what I can find out.

Kind regards
Robert