How To Identify A Snail

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If it has a shell, its a snail.

If it doesn't have a shell, its a slug.

If it has fins, shiny scales and colour then you may have a fish there.

Hope my advice helps mate ;)
 
If it has a shell, its a snail.

If it doesn't have a shell, its a slug.

If it has fins, shiny scales and colour then you may have a fish there.

Hope my advice helps mate ;)


:lol: quality.

I think it's predominantly the shell which allows ID'ing :)
 
This is probably way more info than anyone will want, but here it is anyway.

Traditionally it has been done by shell only, although that is hardly the best way. There are a few key features usually described: coil direction (dextral vs. sinistral), aperture, umbilicus, sutures, and for lack of more fancy terms, how spikey/pointy/round/etc. the shell is overall. Sometimes coloration is mentioned, but not always. Sometimes the operculum is involved too, although these are not always stored with the shell. Museums seem to make an effort to keep the operculums sorted out, but online shell databases often don't include them for some reason.

Unfortunately, shell-only IDing resulted in all kinds of taxonomic shenanigans over time thanks to variation in coloration and morphology within species. Sometimes soft tissue morphology is used, but sometimes more in the sense of what you can dissect on a dead animal than what you can see on a live one. Coloration of the body is ignored in many definitions for marine invertebrates because it historically those features haven't preserved well. Irritatingly, whether driven by stubbornness in individuals or in the field itself, it seems that at least some modern zoologists/biologists still conform to this out-dated approach, only distinguishing two animals in the literature they publish based on something like gill shape when one is always brown and the other is always bright purple with polka dots. Fortunately it seems there are some modern databases trying to move forward and document live animals with photos.

Of course, a combination of morphology and coloration doesn't solve all ID issues. For some groups of snails with highly variable coloration and morphology, DNA is the only way to get a conclusive ID. While I'm not aware off the top of my head of any marine groups suffering from this issue, the freshwater family of apple snails is a classic example of how DNA has reduced other IDing methods for that group to voodoo.

So, in summary:
- Shell only runs the risk of ending up being wrong at a reasonably high taxonomic level, particularly if you haven't stared at millions of the blasted things to already know what to look for. It's pretty common for the inexperienced to land in the wrong family of snails using just a shell.
- Much better to look at the whole animal if you have live animal photo examples to compare against.
 

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