30 year old pomatia?

[kanin]

Hi again. I don't want to spam about the melanistic Helix pomatia I've recently added to my snailgang but I've got some information that I've found very fascinating and just wanted to clarify.
An employee at a pet shop who I came to talk to about the melanistic snail, as he also keep snails as pets, told me that melanistic snails live longer and are more resistant to diseases than snails without this mutation. I searched the Internet and found that this information is true in cases of black panthers and squirrels. He also told me that a melanistic Helix Pomatia lived to be 30 years old.
As I've seen this 30 year old pomatia mentioned in other threads on this forum before I thought someone could verify the information I received? If anyone knows was it in fact melanistic?

-emil.

[coyote]

I've heard about a snail that lived to be 30, but I don't recall its species being mentioned. I'd always assumed it was a GALS.

Wikipedia mentions the legendary 30-year-old snail:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail#Lifespan

But the source they cite links to a pomatia page without any reference to lifespan whatsoever, so there seems to be some confusion.

This article mentions elderly pomatia, but not a 30-year-old:
www.suite101.com/article.cfm/snails_shells/108714

[kanin]

thanks, that sorts some things out. I probably got a little bit carried away and so did the guy that told me about the 30year old pomatia
I'm probably just to excited about my new pomatia

Altough a new issue comes to my mind as the article you linked to mentions "In warmer water, the aquatic snails receive more energy and crawl around more actively than in cooler surroundings. They eat faster, move faster and grow faster.However, this increased activity has a price, and that is a lower life span compared to the snails living in cooler water."
Does this perhaps mean that snailkeepers should as tortoisekeepers optimise slow growth in order to prolong their snails life?

I've also wondered earlier, as i keep tortoises as well, if snails will live longer if we let them hibernate during some of the winter months. As usually is the case with tortoises?

Maybe this belongs in another thread, Idon't know..

[coyote]

For snails that normally estivate or hibernate for part of the year, this is part of their normal metabolism and is "hard-wired" into their cells and organs. I let my garden snails estivate periodically, because it's a normal thing for them to do.

[kanin]

My Pomatias tend to hibernate on their own account during the winter and I usually let them stay in hibernation(or estivation as some of them estivate instead). Only exception was for Ivan who broke his shell pretty badly and then as the repairs probably took a lot of energy he started suffering from retraction syndrome. He's fine now though, force feeding and daily baths, bandading and provation from hibernation got him back to normal and now he spend most of his days mating with Boris.

Now I'm just rambling but do you think maybe it would be best the estivate GALS for periods aswell?, myself I'm not sure, they tend to do so for long periods in the wild though.