CDF Checklist of Galapagos Terrestrial brackish water snails.

PARENT, CH.; MIQUEL, S.E. ; COPPOIS, G.

Otro; CDF Checklist of Galapagos Terrestrial brackish water snails.; 2011

Gastropods, more commonly known as snails and slugs, include marine snails and sea slugs, freshwatersnails and freshwater limpets, and the terrestrial snails and slugs. The name comes from the Greek, meaning“stomach-foot”.The class Gastropoda is the most diversified in the phylum Mollusca with 60,000 to 80,000 living species,and is second only to insects in its number of known species among animals.Morphologically, gastropods arecharacterized by the torsion of their visceral mass and their mantle shell covering so that they are twisted 180degrees in relation to head and foot. Most gastropods have also developed a unique coiled shell which waslost in slugs.The Galapagos land snail fauna is rather poor, with relatively few indigenous and endemicspecies (see the species numbers below).Since most land snails have restricted distribution ranges and are often small and dull-colored, it isconceivable that future fieldwork will add to this list. Interestingly, more than 75% of Galapagos endemicland snails are of the genus Bulimulus, forming the largest adaptive radiation known from these islands.In2009, on the occasion of the joint 50th anniversaries of the Galapagos National Park and the Charles DarwinFoundation, Tui De Roy and Jaqueline De Roy donated the most complete historic collection of terrestrialsnails collected in Galapagos by André De Roy.This important bequest is now housed at the Charles Darwin Foundation, named the in honor of its collector:The André De Roy Invertebrate Collection.