Snailing

There's probably no such word as "snailing," but we today's fieldwork involved looking for snails in mud in a way that reminded me of clamming (we even collected a few small clams in the process). It was harder than clamming, however, for two reasons. First, the snails are pretty small: the largest one we collected was still under 2.5 cm long. Second, we were in amongst rather dense vegetation, so we had to extract the mud from all the stems and roots. The snails that we were particularly looking at (Melanoides tuberculata) are native to northern Africa and southern Asia, and are invasive in Panama. Snails contain lots of parasites, so we bring them back to the lab to dissect and examine. I enjoyed squishing through the mud looking for snails, but the dissecting was more tedious. We crack the shell open with a hammer, extract the snail, and examine it for parasites and baby snails under dissecting microscopes. At least we don't have to feel too bad about killing the snails as they are invasive.

While we were still in the field, however, we also saw some birds including a Great Egret, two Ospreys, and seven Common Moorhens or Gallinules. The Gallinules have very distinctive red patches on their foreheads that particularly flash in the sunlight.

The Common Gallinule or Common Moorhen (Gallinula galeata).