Melanopsis etrusca

The gastropod

Gastropods are snails and slugs. The animal is the soft body; the shell, when present, is grown, not worn like a stone.

Range and habitat

It is endemic to southern Tuscany, central Italy, where it is found in hot springs. It is threatened by the draining of its hot spring habitat.

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

Today it is known from only four locations and its populations are decreasing.

Melanopsis etrusca is 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 Melanopsis etrusca — often a short stub, Wikidata item Q129926. 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.