Critically Endangered
Theba arinagae
Theba arinagae
Theba arinagae is a land snail in the family Helicidae (order Stylommatophora), recorded as Critically Endangered.
The land snail
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
It is endemic to the Canary Islands, where it is known only from the top of a volcano. Its entire range is about 4 square kilometers and it is considered a critically endangered species.
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
Theba arinagae 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 Theba arinagae — often a short stub, Wikidata item Q5466136. 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.
