Wildlife doesn’t have to mean a furry critter lurking under a log waiting for dinner to pass by. Neither does it always soar on the wind, or swim like some prehistoric monster from the deep. Sometimes wild animals are quiet achievers, making little in the way of fuss and bother and simply getting on with life in general.
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Waterhouse’s Snail is one such animal.
Waterhouse’s Snail is the largest freshwater snail in Australia. It is easily recognisable due to its huge four-centimeter size and brown-banded shell. It also has a rusty colored operculum or roundish hard trapdoor at the mouth of its shell that it closes tightly if it needs to protect itself from drying out in times of drought.
Like 90 per cent of gastropods, the Waterhouse’s Snail has a dextral or ‘right-handed’ shell. This means that when you hold the shell with the pointy bit up and have the opening or aperture more or less facing you the aperture will be on the right hand side of the shell.
Unlike some gastropods, the Waterhouse’s Snail is a livebearer meaning that it doesn’t lay eggs. Female snails have a brood pouch where they brood the babies, releasing them into the water as mobile, miniature forms of adult snails. Waterhouse’s Snail lunches on periphyton, a mix of algae, bacteria, detritus and other microbes that it finds in waterholes in the Central Northern Territory and Western Queensland regions.
Dr Richard Willan at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory said these slippery little suckers can be a little fussy about water temperature and oxygen levels.
The Waterhouse’s Snail has gills, which means that it can live comfortably underwater staying protected from the harsh Australian sun. This nifty adaptation does however have one big drawback. When the world heats up at the beginning of the wet season, before the rain begins, oxygen levels in isolated billabongs can fall rapidly to the point where our shelly hero can no longer survive.
On second thoughts, I think that a huge, right-handed gastropod that pups identical versions of itself, grazes on bacteria with a multi-toothed tongue, breathes underwater and comes fully equipped with a trapdoor is totally wild!