Portal:Gastropods
The gastropods portalGastropods (/ˈɡæstrəpɒdz/), commonly known as slugs and snails, belong to a large taxonomic class of invertebrates within the phylum Mollusca called Gastropoda (/ɡæsˈtrɒpədə/). This class comprises snails and slugs from saltwater, freshwater, and from the land. There are many thousands of species of sea snails and slugs, as well as freshwater snails, freshwater limpets, land snails and slugs. The class Gastropoda is a diverse and highly successful class of mollusks within the phylum Mollusca. It contains a vast total of named species, second only to the insects in overall number. The fossil history of this class goes back to the Late Cambrian. As of 2017[update], 721 families of gastropods are known, of which 245 are extinct and appear only in the fossil record, while 476 are currently extant with or without a fossil record. Gastropoda (previously known as univalves and sometimes spelled "Gasteropoda") are a major part of the phylum Mollusca, and are the most highly diversified class in the phylum, with 65,000 to 80,000 living snail and slug species. The anatomy, behavior, feeding, and reproductive adaptations of gastropods vary significantly from one clade or group to another, so stating many generalities for all gastropods is difficult. The class Gastropoda has an extraordinary diversification of habitats. Representatives live in gardens, woodland, deserts, and on mountains; in small ditches, great rivers, and lakes; in estuaries, mudflats, the rocky intertidal, the sandy subtidal, the abyssal depths of the oceans, including the hydrothermal vents, and numerous other ecological niches, including parasitic ones. Although the name "snail" can be, and often is, applied to all the members of this class, commonly this word means only those species with an external shell big enough that the soft parts can withdraw completely into it. Slugs are gastropods that have no shell or a very small, internal shell; semislugs are gastropods that have a shell that they can partially retreat into but not entirely. The marine shelled species of gastropods include species such as abalone, conches, periwinkles, whelks, and numerous other sea snails that produce seashells that are coiled in the adult stage—though in some, the coiling may not be very visible, for example in cowries. In a number of families of species, such as all the various limpets, the shell is coiled only in the larval stage, and is a simple conical structure after that. (Full article...) Selected article Juliidae, common name the bivalved gastropods, is a family of minute sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks or micromollusks in the superfamily Oxynooidea, an opisthobranch group. This family of snails is extremely unusual in that their shells consist of two separate hinged pieces or valves, which are joined by a ligament, and which look nothing like a normal snail shell, but instead look almost exactly like the two hinged valves of a clam, a bivalve mollusk, a very different class of animals. In the past the Juliidae were known only from fossil shells, and not surprisingly these fossils were therefore interpreted as being the shells of bivalves. Julia, which is the type genus of the family, was named in 1862 by Augustus Addison Gould, who described it as a bivalve genus. Julliidae are known from the Eocene period to the Recent, but they probably first appeared during the Paleocene. (Read more...) Selected biography Baldwin was born on November 26, 1831 in Honolulu. His father was early missionary doctor Dwight Baldwin (1798–1886), and his mother was Charlotte Fowler Baldwin (1805–1873). After a few years living in Waimea, the family moved to the island of Maui in about 1837. Baldwin lived in Connecticut for a time and received both his undergraduate degree and a Master of Arts from Yale. In 1890, he moved to Haʻikū, where his younger brother Henry Perrine Baldwin (1842–1911) had founded the agricultural venture Alexander & Baldwin with his brother-in-law Samuel Thomas Alexander (1836–1904). At this time Baldwin devoted much of his efforts to studying mollusks, i.e. to malacology, specifically the study of Hawaiian land snails, some of which he named and described. In addition, several land snail species in the family Achatinellidae were named in honor of him, as well as a subgenus Baldwinia of the genus Partulina. He produced the first catalog of Hawaiian land snails and freshwater snails in 1893. (Read more...) Did you know?
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Selected image This minute Desmoulin's whorl snail Vertigo moulinsiana is an example of a stylommatophoran land snail: it has only one pair of tentacles. Its brown shell has four whorls and is about 3 mm in length. This rare land snail lives in marshes and swamps in Europe. It is protected by the European Union's Habitats Directive. Lists of gastropods
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Related portalsSubcategoriesCategories about gastropods: Request to editors: please do not create any more categories of gastropods by country. Instead create list articles, article with a list of the marine or non-marine gastropods of whichever country or area you are interested in. We would also like to empty and delete the two remaining country categories we have, adding that information to list articles instead. Thank you. Things to do
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