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What is the place of freshwater snails in modern culture, if any? Does their alleged rarity and undeniable strangeness elicit conservation concern in small circles of the environmentally conscious? Might even smaller circles of professionals in tropical medicine and health worry about their potential to host parasitic diseases? And aren't some freshwater snails invasive? Or maybe they're just cute pets?
Collected in the present volume are 36 essays, originally published in the genre-defining artistic universe known as the FWGNA Blog, exploring freshwater gastropod biology in the modern mileau. Our focus is on the larger prosobranchs - the viviparids and the ampullariid "mystery snails" - as well as on the familiar pulmonate snails of the hobbyist aquarium and the lab bench.
Reproductive allocation and the species concept, especially as applied to asexually-reproducing populations, emerge as primary themes, together with the omnipresent phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity. And along the way we'll check in with Gary, a pet mystery snail, who doesn't smell so good. The essays collected here will be an essential companion both to the Volume 1 results of the FWGNA surveys of Atlantic drainages published in 2019, and to the results of the Volume 5 Ohio drainage surveys published in 2023.
About the author
Dr. Robert T. Dillon, Jr. is America's foremost authority on freshwater gastropods. From 1983 until his retirement in 2016 he was Professor of Biology at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He is the author of The Ecology of Freshwater Molluscs (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and over 60 scientific papers on the genetics, evolution, and ecology of snails. A former president of the American Malacological Society, Dr. Dillon contributed the freshwater gastropod chapter to the popular 2006 AMS publication, The Mollusks: A Guide to their Study, Collection and Preservation. In 1998 he founded the Freshwater Gastropods of North America Project, a long-term, collaborative effort to inventory and monograph the entire gastropod fauna inhabiting every river, lake and stream throughout the continent north of Mexico. The first four volumes in the FWGNA series were published in 2019.
