Banff Springs snail

The gastropod

Banff Springs snail is a gastropod in the family Physidae — Physella johnsoni.

Range and habitat

The Banff Springs snail was first identified in 1926 in the nine sulphurous hot springs of Sulphur Mountain in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada, and has been found nowhere else. Since its discovery, its range has shrunk to just five of the nine hot springs.

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

Diet

Snails move on a single foot and feed with a rasping tongue. Island and spring species rarely recolonise once the site is emptied.

In crisis

The reduction in Banff Spring snail population and range is likely attributable to human use of the hot springs, although fluctuating water temperature is also a factor. In 2000 it was classified as endangered by COSEWIC and the Canadian Species at Risk Act listed it in the List of Wildlife Species at Risk as being endangered in Canada. In 1996 Parks Canada started a research and recovery program for the snail among them the closure of the swimming pool at the Cave and Basin National Historic Site.

The goals of the program are to maintain self-sustaining populations of the snail, re-establish populations at all historic locations, and hopefully to downlist the species' status. The snail population fluctuates seasonally.

Banff Springs snail 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 Banff Springs snail, Wikidata item Q3061785. 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.