Kevin
Archachatina dimidiata
Posts: 2,227
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Post by Kevin on Dec 18, 2005 21:19:58 GMT
What species this is..from this picture? Thanks
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Post by sezzy5889 on Dec 18, 2005 21:20:50 GMT
looks like a striped panthera to me :-)
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Kevin
Archachatina dimidiata
Posts: 2,227
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Post by Kevin on Dec 18, 2005 21:21:18 GMT
looks like a striped panthera to me :-) Thats what I thought
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LisaLQ
Archachatina papyracea
Old friend (emphasis on the "old")
Posts: 2,995
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Post by LisaLQ on Dec 19, 2005 1:56:17 GMT
He's gorgeous, whatever he is ;D
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2005 18:15:12 GMT
hmm...im not sure. personally i wud say immaculata but it cud be striped panthera. theyre practically the same thing anyway.
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Post by sezzy5889 on Dec 19, 2005 18:18:18 GMT
I don't think immac would be as dark as that
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2005 18:27:13 GMT
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Post by sezzy5889 on Dec 19, 2005 18:29:35 GMT
but hasn't immac and dimi just been classed as the same species, and dimi's don't look anything like that
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Arno
Archachatina puylaerti
Posts: 1,493
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Post by Arno on Dec 19, 2005 18:29:36 GMT
Yes that snail looks exactly like the one in Kevins pic....
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2005 18:31:41 GMT
but hasn't immac and dimi just been classed as the same species, and dimi's don't look anything like that but normal immaculatas do. im saying it looks like old school immaculata, not dimidiata.
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Post by sezzy5889 on Dec 19, 2005 18:35:53 GMT
old school, lol do panthera and immaculata have the same colour columella then? ?
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2005 18:36:49 GMT
yes, pink
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Post by sezzy5889 on Dec 19, 2005 18:38:13 GMT
hmmm
maybe panthera and immac are the same species, they should be classed as, instead of immac's and dimi's...
Well i'd call it panthera, but the truth will never be known!
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2005 18:42:29 GMT
yeh the thing is striped panthera look a lot like immaculata. the only difference is the shell of panthera is more slender, but thats not very reliable. immaculata are sometimes referred to as a sub-species of panthera.
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gabi
Achatina tincta
Posts: 616
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Post by gabi on Dec 19, 2005 18:44:01 GMT
Thanks Kevin, for loading the pic for me! I haven´t seen this snails in original yet. I am getting them middle of January. The woman keeping them right now hasn´t even known she is keeping an achatina-snail. First she wrote that she has zillions of them and now she wrote in an e-mail that most of them are dead, because she has forgotten to feed them the last weeks.... So do I understand right? Immaculata and panthera are the same species?
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Arno
Archachatina puylaerti
Posts: 1,493
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Post by Arno on Dec 19, 2005 18:56:55 GMT
yes they are...like Mike said the differences are in the shells but those can be variable,since immaculata was described first and panthera later,i'll view immaculata as the true species
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2005 19:04:28 GMT
well...i wudnt call immaculata and panthera *the same* species its just that some forms of them can overlap sometimes ID-wise.
ohhh those poor babies. its a shame they died i love immaculata.
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Post by Paul on Dec 20, 2005 0:00:23 GMT
well...i wudnt call immaculata and panthera *the same* species its just that some forms of them can overlap sometimes ID-wise. Well, according to Albert Mead, they ARE the same species, exactly. They have the same internal sex organs. Any shell differences are just that, variations. But, assuming they are separate for now, I would say the picture shows a true panthera, they are exactly like the panthera I had which were ID'd by the British Natural History Museum.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2005 13:12:25 GMT
but I dont understand. How can there be so much variation in one species. there's brown panthera, striped panthera, dark stripy immaculata and two-tone immaculata. sorry im being retarded but i just find it difficult to understand how this this this and this are all the same species. doesnt it seem a bit strange? theres not even that much variation in fulica.
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Post by Paul on Dec 20, 2005 13:58:12 GMT
Well, we know there is vast variation in immaculata, check out the immaculata here: home.global.co.za/~peabrain/achatina.htmthat is the only real stretch of the imagination. The rest of the variation is comparable to fulica or margies. There are variations in how slender they are, and the stripes of the shell. They are also quite broadly spread it seems, a lot of the old geographical data is confusing because there are so many misidentifications and unreliable reports. At the end of the day, snails have massive polymorphism and their appearance is affected by environment and diet. The best way of identifying molluscs is via their sex organs. Albert Mead has done this for panthera and immaculata and found them to be identical although it is not widely accepted yet for a few reasons. He announced a publication in 2004 which promised to recategorise the Achatinidae based on dissection. He also warned that this would include a complete revision on sub-genus to genus statuses, so we;d have Lissachatina, Achatina, Tholachatina, Calachatina etc. instead of Achatina and Archachatina. Has the publication appeared? Not yet! I've even contacted Albert Mead and his institute but I've had no reply. The truth is that there is limited modern research on Achatinids. We have a gulf between visual identification and dodgy geographical reports and modern DNA and dissection methods. The thing that makes this a lot worse is that we have loads of unknown snails knocking about, we know nothing about where they were originally from, what they've been kept with along the lineage. Time and time again we see false identifications, as a hobby one misidentification propagates everywhere. And people accept an identification on hearsay alone. The more I look at species identifications the more unsure I am about a lot of what we have, such as the stuhlmanni and I even have doubts on the reticulata we have, certainly the ventricosa. The chances of a new study being completed seem small to me, as Albert Mead is 90-odd. It'd be quicker to conduct our own; snail reproductive systems are not complex at all. But who has the time or inclination without funding? I really have tried to hunt info down but these academic institutes don't wish to play along. Any that have replied have been incredibly ill-informed. It's not all bad, I think we have come a long way, I've certainly learned a lot in the short time I've been doing it. I think that this apparent grouping of species in captivity is a good thing not a bad thing, and it is explained by the culture in that it is likely that only a few species ever make it into popular ownership. And in this case, it kind of corners off the pink columella area by reducing the possibilities. We've always wanted to produce a species key, and I'm beginning to think this can be done at least at species level. But it needs a real collaborative effort on our part because none of us have a complete collection. If we're really gonna do this, we need really good photographs from all the right angles and illustrations with measurements. I'd suggest we do this with wild-caught snails wherever possible. Over the holiday I think I'll try and start a key and I'll take some pics and draw some things to give everyone an idea of what we're looking at. There are many gaps in the knowledge of species. We keep some species not mentioned in Bequaert other than by name. His book was apparently the first of a series, but I can't find any others if they even exist. So we need to start documenting what the eye can see easily, such as in the case of smithii. They are pretty distinctive but we need to be able to record why. For any we are unsure about we'll just try and group them together by similarity until we turn up what they are.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2005 14:08:55 GMT
yeh we need a really good species key. like first have a picture of an archetypal specimen of that species, then more pictures of how much possible variation there can be.
but more difficult is explaining to everyone about how to identify and what to look for. i mean most people still call the two-tone immaculata dimidiata and a lot of people only know them as GALS let alone different species and variants.
paul, maybe you could put some of the data from the bequaert book about proportions of body whorls etc. so everyone knows how to ID snails more precisely??
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Post by Paul on Dec 20, 2005 14:25:48 GMT
I wish it was that simple, but I'd have to type the book up because not one factor is conclusive and there is no standardisation of data between any species. I have been doing it in dribs and drabs and I was hoping to scan some, but again there is a hell of a lot to sift through of various specimens, differences in accounts between experts, historical nomenclature etc. It isn't like it tells you the ratios all though it does give a few example sizes for each species. The more I read it and cross-reference within it, I'm getting a better picture of the differences, I need to jot down each point of ID for each species and see if they can be related to each other because not all the data exists for each species. A lot of the time columella colour is not mentioned. And you can't take this to mean it doesn't have a colour. Suturalis were overlooked time and again because not many malacologists recorded the red columella, even in drawings!! And then we have the ones not even covered, it doesn't cover that many species at all, only 20 in fact, many of which aren't kept in captivity and some are described from one single shell in an old collection. The S.African book shows pictures but there is very little good data. The descriptions are very basic. I'd like to know about the columella colour in stuhlmanni because based on Nisbet and what we know of "panthera", I'm leaning towards our stuhlmanni being panthera also. On Arno's site the stuhlmanni pic does not have a pink columella but that is the only one I can find. Until we conclusively prove crossbreeding it seems odd to me that the only reliable example is stuhlmanni/panthera. I need to find out the columella colour of a wild-caught confirmed stuhlmanni, that isn't an old shell where is could have worn. These differences in immaculata that have been proven by Mead cast doubt on simple length/width measurements that the book provides. I think there is more reliance on aperture/body whorl/shell length ratios. There are other indicators to help us, has any one noticed the groove in the columella that develops in juvenile tigers? Things like that will help us document the species better. I think we have to be prepared for disappointments and revelations but I'm against the idea of deciding a snail is one species because I want it to be, so I think it is a good thing.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2005 14:31:51 GMT
so stuhlmanni should have a white-blue columella?
what do you mean you have doubts about our reticulata?
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Post by Paul on Dec 20, 2005 14:39:41 GMT
I don't know what stuhlmanni should have, I just know the pic Arno has doesn't have a pink one, and the stuhlmanni I have sound like the panthera from Nisbet's study. And I had a chat with Raphael about it because I had my doubts and it turns out he had the very same doubts so I'd like to see shell examples or some literature about it to see what really is the case. I mean wild snails though, not captive one's because they are completely unreliable.
Regarding the reticulata, all the ones pictured in Beqaert don't look like ours, they have more reticulated shells, more like Yuris. Some are similar but the most consistently similar one's to our reticulata are albopicta which are very similar and related. The pics are black and white though but in terms of shape and texture they look like albopicta. I'm not saying ours aren't reticulata because Bequaert describes them as the most beautiful achatinid and ours are certainly very pretty whereas Yuris reticulata is a bit weird looking, I wouldn't describe it as the most beautiful achatinid. Again so few guaranteed examples and unfortunately Bequaert says they are very similar, and it seems from his descriptions there is enough variation in both species to make IDing very difficult. There is certainly no smoking gun. So all I'm saying is that as far as I'm concerned it is likely to be reticulata but not guaranteed, it could be an albopicta. Albopicta btw, don't necessarily have red anywhere; columella, lip, apex etc.
I'm just being very conservative regarding species names from now on. Any not definites are exactly that.
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LisaLQ
Archachatina papyracea
Old friend (emphasis on the "old")
Posts: 2,995
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Post by LisaLQ on Dec 20, 2005 19:12:14 GMT
I'm not saying ours aren't reticulata because Bequaert describes them as the most beautiful achatinid and ours are certainly very pretty whereas Yuris reticulata is a bit weird looking, I wouldn't describe it as the most beautiful achatinid. I think those retics on his site are beautiful - but each to their own ;D I know this should be another thread really, but my retic Monty (previously Nat's) has a black head...and the piccies I've seen of albos online dont have black heads. But I guess that comes down to snails having lots of variation
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