Achatinella cestus

Appearance

A. Apexfulva was a small snail, with a shell measuring 19 mm in length and 12 mm in diameter. The original description of subspecies A. Apexfulva cestus, by Wesley Newcomb, provided:The shell is solid and ventricose, tapering to a sharp point at the summit. The coloration of the shell is striking and complex.

Range and habitat

This species was endemic to forests of the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian archipelago, United States.

This individual was named George, after Lonesome George, a Pinta Island tortoise from the Galapagos Islands who was also the last of his kind.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet

While A. Apexfulva lived on the leaves of trees, it was not herbivorous. Its diet consisted of algae and mold that it ate off leaves.

In crisis

A. Apexfulva is presumed extinct. It was listed as federally endangered since 1981. A major cause of its population decline in the wild was predation by the rosy wolfsnail.

The rosy wolfsnail, a central-American native, was introduced to Hawaii in the 1950s to control agricultural pests. Even so, as a carnivore of other snails it does not discriminate in its choice of food and has been the cause of at least eight other snail extinctions in Hawaii.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Achatinella cestus is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Achatinella cestus, Wikidata item Q4673568. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.