Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer I can imagine how, over 150 years ago, Emma Darwin showed her usual patience and love when her husband Charles began to submerge land snails in seawater. What was Charles trying to do? Actually, he was trying to solve one of the great mysteries of nature, how the slow and fragile land snails appear in the midst of the deadliest deserts, and on distant islands that were never connected to a continent. Charles Lyell, whose geology book was instrumental in Darwin discovering how species evolve, suggested that land snails could only have reached […]
Archivos diarios: 12 julio, 2021
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Author: Julián Monge Nájera, Ecologist and Photographer Some snails appear mysteriously in temporary ponds so small that they would not be enough to fill a large pot. How do they get there? Do all of them die when the pond dries up? And, in that case, how does the species survive? In order to understand the life of the pond snails that appear mysteriously all over the world, even in rain pools, I chose Aplexa hypnorum as an example, a typical snail of that group for which there is a nice study, done by malacologists Cornelis den Hartog and L. de Wolf, […]