Interactive key to Jamaican land snails

Gary Rosenberg and David Drumm

Posted 29 December 2004; updated 6 January and 5 August 2005

The key to Jamaican land snails is hosted on the DiscoverLife website and uses the 20q software developed by John Pickering at the University of Georgia. Much of the development of the key was done during 2004 by Gary Rosenberg and David Drumm. Rosenberg determined the characters to be scored and worked with Drumm to develop consistent codings for characters states and to test the key as it developed. Drumm did most of the photography and coding of characters.

Instructions for use

The DiscoverLife website provides instructions that appear on the left side of the screen when the key is started. Follow the links for "How to begin" and "How to identify things". Also read "Caveats" and "Helpful hints" below.

Caveats

• The specimen being identified is assumed to be an undamaged adult.
• Some species are not yet included in the key.
• The key does not resolve to species level in all cases.
• The key is still under development; comments are welcome.

Helpful hints

Click on the pictures to zoom in for a better view of the characters. Questions can be answered in any order or skipped; more than one box can be checked if one is uncertain or the species is polymorphic.

After answering each question, click "identify". This will give a list of species meeting the selected criteria. We recommend not clicking the "simplify" button at the top of this screen until at least several of the initial questions have been answered. "Simplify" shows additional questions beyond those on the opening screen, but eliminate questions that are not relevant to the remaining species.

The key generally will get you to within a handful of species, usually congeneric or confamilial, which can then be compared by clicking through on the names of the species to see photographs.

If you suspect your specimen is not adult, pick a larger size range and a greater number of whorls than your specimens exhibits. Also, juveniles usually do not have features of the adult lip developed, so skip such questions.

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