pavement shells

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Everyone,

With this year's erratic weather and abundant Cepaea Grove Snails along
the east side of County Road 18 in my doing-the-streets transect, I've
been seeing uncrushed dead-on-road snails for the first time. Yesterday
there were four of them, and I put the three I hadn't stepped on in a
bit of water to see if they'd revive - which they didn't.

One reads so often of snails that had been in the British Museum for 140
years, which then perkily revived when dampened (perhaps somewhat
exaggerated), that it's strange to see them killed by just a day or so
out in the open. I wonder if the coarse sand/fine gravel substrate
somehow prevents them from shutting down properly? It's hard to imagine
that there's still residual road salt in the shoulder gravel, but maybe
this is the problem - there's certainly road salt recrystallizing in the
cracks in the pavement.

fred.
===================================

17 June 2024 - Canada: Ontario: Grenville County: Oxford-on-Rideau:
Bishops Mills(Co Road 18/Mill St. intersection). (200m ard
intersection), 44.87246° N 75.70096° W TIME: 2032-2046. AIR TEMP: 28°C,
clear, sunset, Beaufort light air. HABITAT: streets in rural village &
surrounding fields, facing 30 Main Street-6 St Lawrence St. OBSERVER:
Frederick W. Schueler. 2024/147/ec, Cepaea nemoralis (Mollusca).
13(+?)DOR,2AOR adult, dead on road, alive on road, specimen. along E
side Co Road 18, streets dry, shoulders moist.

Weirs House mailboxes: medium-size 5-banded & mid-banded juv on box-side
edge of track.

Co Road 18 at Intersection: 1 mature pavement shell.

Along Rolands Lawn: 1 mature pavement shell.

Telephone Pole Daylilies: 1 mature pavement shell previously stepped on,
ca 10 DOR in patches on pavement.

Across from Pipers House: 1 large juv pavement shell.

Some DORs on pavement, or small juvs on shoulder may have been missed.
"Pavement shells" put in water to see if they would revive.

18 June: None of the pavement shells did revive, and all had bodies in
the shell, so they'd died by being out on the shoulder of the road in
the heat/dryness. Why would this kill them so soon? We hadn't yet had
extreme heat - is it the gravelly substrate?

--
------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Fragile Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/
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6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca>
------------------------------------------------------------

[rmb...@istar.ca]

My disappointment with snails has to do with photography. We just had
our Kingston Field Naturalists' annual Bio Blitz in Yarker, and I had
picked up 3 snail shells and photographed them with the powershot
camera. Well that stupid camera has buttons on the right side where
you hold it and my big thumb keeps hitting the ISO button, clicking it
up to 800 ISO in bright sunlight, blowing the exposure all to heck (I
restrain myself to more polite semantics that the language I used
while downloading the images). There's 3 species off my list, plus
several others. ARGH! From now I'll stick to the Rebel with the 50mm
lens.

Rose-Marie

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