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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
issued November 22, 2019 from near the forest just west of Tepakán; elev. ~9m (~30 ft), N21.053°, W89.052°; north-central Yucatán state, MÉXICO
ORTHALICUS SNAIL OUT OF HER SHELL
On a rainy morning after several days of afternoons rains, the ORTHALICUS cf. PRINCEPS snail shown below appeared climbing a water-soaked, dead stem of Tithonia rotundifolia:
Usually we see only the shell of this species attached to tree trunks and stems, awaiting rain or a dewy night to roam about. More info below.
issued September 8, 2019 from near the forest just west of Tepakán; elev. ~9m (~30 ft), N21.053°, W89.052°; north-central Yucatán state, MÉXICO
ORTHALICUS SNAIL RESTING ON A STEM
At mid-morning, the snail shown below was seen resting about 7ft up (2m) on a heavily shaded woody vine stem in the forest:
More info in next entry
from the November 6, 2011 Newsletter issued from Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá Ruins; limestone bedrock; elevation ~39m (~128ft), N20.675°, W88.569°; central Yucatán state, MÉXICO
ORTHALICUS SNAIL ON THE BATEA
Monday morning, my first day back, it was raining when the new snail turned up on my clothes-washing stand, or batea. That's it below.
Volunteer identifier Bea in Ontario figured this one out as belonging to the genus Orthalicus, but we had problems deciding on the species. However, on the internet we found a real malacologist -- a mollusk expert -- specializing in neotropical snails. He was Bram Breure at the National Museum of Natural History in The Netherlands, and he helped us out.
Upon seeing the above picture he wrote, "It is always hard to ID a snail with only one picture, especially these orthalicids as they are bewildering variable. Your picture of Orthalicus is likely O. princeps (Broderip in Sowerby, 1833), given the locality. O. undatus is an Antillean species, and O. ponderosus a northern Mexican."
So: ORTHALICUS PRINCEPS is distributed from southern Mexico through Central America into northern South America.
On the Internet, except for a paper describing the species' sexual parts (authored by Bram Breure himself), there's not much more information about this snail. Therefore, maybe we're helping science a little by announcing that in the Central Yucatán at the end of the rainy season on a rainy morning in early November it's possible to find Orthalicus princeps slowly wandering across a fellow's built-of-stone, outside clothes-washing batea.