Bonus Observation of the Week, 10/10/16

This Crystallopsis hunteri snail, seen in the Solomon Islands by @vespadelus, is our bonus Observation of the Week!

There are so many great observations posted to iNat everyday that it’s an embarrassment of riches and tough for me to pick one for Observation of the Week. I contacted Michael Pennay about his amazing snail find but only recently was able to get a reply, as he was out in field.

“The field,” of course, is the Solomon Islands, where he’s been working two and a half years. Originally from Australia, Michael has also worked in Papua New Guinea and says “[I] love the Pacific Islands, there are so many cool things to see and many people have an exceptional intimate understanding of their environment.”

His current work in the Solomon Islands recently involved a biodiversity survey in the highlands of  Makira island, “a three day hike from the coast uphill and a hard slog carrying survey equipment.” Michael says “In the highlands are beautiful moss forests [see below] that are constantly wet. There are mythical creatures called kakamora that Makira legend has it lives in the forests, and seeing these places you could believe it. Being almost constantly wet the forest had an amazing array of orchids and snails.”

The Crystallopsis hunteri snail that Michael found is one of the many cool gastropods he found there (check out this semi-slug). It’s beautiful, of course, but if you look closely you’ll see that its shell is actually translucent! Many juveniles are green, but only some adults are (here are some other photos for comparison), so there is quite a bit of easily noticeable variation in comparison to some other snail species. This is also  the first observation of this species posted on iNat.

Michael continues his field work, using iNat to keep track of some of his finds. “I mainly use iNaturalist as a personal field notebook to record my observations from particular places so I can look back on them...I really love the community ID side of it and appreciate the assistance of other users in identifying species I’m unfamiliar with. There are some amazingly talented and knowledgeable members of the iNaturalist community. I try to reciprocate this as much as possible by providing IDs for species that I'm familiar with.”

- by Tony Iwane

Posted on 11 de outubro de 2016, 05:01 AM by tiwane