Hemicycla plicaria

The land snail

It was first described by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1816.

Helicid land snails carry a coiled shell and a muscular foot. They are hermaphrodites and need calcium and moisture.

These are the familiar land snails and slugs: air-breathing gastropods with a lung, not a gill.

Range and habitat

Hemicycla plicaria is recorded from Spain, Portugal, United States, Germany, Philippines, and Dominican Republic.

GBIF currently lists 134 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.

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

Diet

Land snails rasp plants and detritus with a radula and seal the shell in dry weather. Introduced predators and habitat clearing hit them hard.

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

Hemicycla plicaria 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 Hemicycla plicaria — often a short stub, Wikidata item Q309269 and GBIF occurrence geography. 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.