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Junn Kitt Foon

@jkfni.bsky.social

40 followers 130 following 2 posts

studying 🐌🐌🐌 RG: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Junn-Foon LN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkfoon Web: https://sites.google.com/view/jkfoon/home

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Junn Kitt Foon @jkfni.bsky.social · Jun 11

It’s been 5 years since a presumed extinct snail species was rediscovered. Now, after a successful ex-situ breeding program at Taronga Zoo, scientists are bringing their descendants back home. australian.museum/blog/amri-ne...

Homecoming! A journey from stress to success for Norfolk Island snails

It’s been five years since Norfolk Island local, Mark Scott, showed Malacologists from the Australian Museum a small living population of a snail species previously feared to be extinct. After a succe...

australian.museum

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Francine Fox @francinefox.bsky.social · 22d

Progress made on my big oil painting of nautiluses. 🧡

#nautilus #allonautilus #marinelife #deepseacreatures #mollusks #cephalopods #oilpainting #wildlifeart #animalart 🐡 🦑

Detail shot of a nautilus painted with oil on canvas. The background is a vibrant blue with copper mica scraped over it.

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Francine Fox @francinefox.bsky.social · 17d

My second nautilus is much closer to done after today’s session at the easel. Next weekend, the allonautilus!

#nautilus #allonautilus #marinelife #deepseacreatures #mollusks #cephalopods #oilpainting #wildlifeart #animalart 🐡 🦑

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Zooniverse @zooniverse.bsky.social · 29d

✨ SNAIL SCRIBE ARCHIVE - this new 🐌 Zooniverse transcription project is all about molluscan biodiversity data. It seeks to promote the conservation and critical scientific research of these under-appreciated animals! www.zooniverse.org/projects/ske...

Cartoon snail mascot for Zooniverse project: Snail Scribe Archive

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Jean-François Cudennec @jfcudennec.bsky.social · Sep 22

More arcaheological limpets for #MolluscMonday 💙

In late prehistory HawaÏ (late 1500s/ early 1600s), shrines were built next to houses, and filled delicate food as offerings, including some neat limpet stacks, some still in their original position of deposition.

Source : tinyurl.com/dbjurdw9

Photo of the area described as a shrine : a ring of small boulders and cobbles, where the western portion was excavated and then backfilled with clean sand

detail of the shrine surface showing two clusters of limpet (Cellana sandwicensis) offerings in their original position of placement. Other visible items include fine-grained basalt flakes, helmet urchin spines (Colobocentrotus atratus), blue-black urchin test or body parts (Echinothrix diadema), rock snail (Drupa sp.), cowry (Cypraea sp.), shark or ray vertebra (Elasmobranch), and spiny puffer (Diodon sp.) mouth parts. Scale bars are 10 cm. Photos: M. Weisler.

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Teresa Rose Osborne, PhD @trosborne.bsky.social · Sep 21

Happy #MolluscMonday!
Snail shells in traditional Pacific arts:
🐚In the Marianas, Chamorro & Refaluwasch people used akaleha' tree snails to make beaded bags & jewelry
🌏Many Pacific cultures use seashells for islands in stick chart maps, combining art, science, & geography
#JoyOfMolluscs

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Megan M. Weber @meganweber.bsky.social · Sep 4

Did you miss our webinar about mercury levels in game fish from zebra mussel infested waters last month! If so, you're in luck because the recording is now live. @maisrc.bsky.social researcher, Gretchen Hansen shared a great presentation about this research!
z.umn.edu/MercuryRising
#bioinvasions

Webinar: Mercury Rising: How Zebra Mussels are Changing Fish Contaminants

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

z.umn.edu

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The Ricciardians @ricciardilab.bsky.social · Sep 4

Meet the freshwater mussel Margaritifera margaritifera. It can live for up to 130 years. It uses salmonid fishes as hosts for its larval stage. It is endangered in Europe but stable in Atlantic North America. It belongs in a different family than most other N. American & European freshwater mussels.

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Dan Killam @dantheclamman.blog · Aug 31

Yo dawg we heard you like shells...the Stimpson chimney clam is a shell in a shell. These little bivalves bore into loose shells, building little chimneys of cemented shell fragments once they grow past the thickness of their host shell. (223)

Photo by the legendary José Leal, Bailey Matthews Shell Museum. Chimney clams poke out of a sand dollar like little white chimneys

Photo from jaxshells.org. a chimney clam chimney coming out of a gastropod shell features many little cemented shelly fragments

An ark shell has many borings, and inside some little igloo like housings can be seen

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C. Chen @ Jamsteeeec @squamiferum.bsky.social · Aug 27

[New Paper] We found a SECOND SNAIL with HARD SCALES on the foot -- Ifremeria nautilei lives in deep-sea hot vents and makes chitinous scales not by secretion but by cell differentiation, like our own skin!

@royalsocietypublishing.org Proceedings B, OPEN ACCESS: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

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🦕Journal of Systematic Palaeontology🦴 @journalsystpal.bsky.social · Aug 27

Did you know.. Molluscs are the second most diverse phylum and possibly the most disparate! 🐚🦪🐌🐙🦑

A recent study by Karapunar et al. (2024) documents the phylogeny of Pleurotomariidae, the longest-living gastropod group, comparing different shell characters: buff.ly/2pEof6e @spissatella.bsky.social

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iNaturalist @inaturalist.bsky.social · Aug 27

We're big fans of snails over here. Here's a species that has less than 10 iNaturalist observations: Sheldonia cotyledonis!

📷 cliffdorse on iNaturalist
📍 South Africa
🔗: www.inaturalist.org/observations...
#ObservationOfTheDay #InverteFest

An orangey-brown snail with a striking white and brown shell crawls over a rock.

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Dan Killam @dantheclamman.blog · Aug 26

The mangrove jingle shell lives attached to the lower leaves of mangroves! It is not actually air living, and still needs to be immersed by the tides occasionally to survive. Still, I consider it a sign of hope that the clams are working on invading our lands and it is only a matter of time. (209)

A flat golden shell is attached to a mangrove leaf. Photo by the legendary Ria Tan for Wild Singapore

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Katie Collins @spissatella.bsky.social · Aug 26

Enigmonia bognorensis, from the early Eocene of Hampshire UK. 55mya or so, the southern UK (and northern France) were a hot tropical sea, and at the margins were mangroves - and mangrove jingle shells!

A long ovoid brown shiny fossil bivalve sits in a white person's hand, showing the interior with one big central muscle scar

An oval brown shiny fossil bivalve sits in a white person's hand, showing the exterior with its unusual central beak and faint concentric and radial ribbing - it looks a little like a limpet

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Maxime Dahirel @mdahirel.bsky.social · Aug 26

It's #InverteFest, so it's time to correct my forgetting to post about my latest paper from a couple months ago. It has *double* the invertebrates: snails, and their parasites! doi.org/10.1093/cz/z...

How does urbanization shape shell phenotype, behavior, and parasite prevalence in the snail Cornu aspersum?

Abstract. Urbanization is a complex and multivariate environmental change, leading to habitat fragmentation and loss, changes in local climate, soil imperv

doi.org

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Teresa Rose Osborne, PhD @trosborne.bsky.social · Aug 25

Happy #MolluscMonday of #InverteFest!
Please enjoy these Partula lutaensis (Family Partulidae, Chamorro: akaleha' Luta)
These snails are only found on Rota Island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands 🏝️
#JoyOfMolluscs #MolluskMonday 1/2

Two snails hang next to each other on a leaf. One has a yellow shell with a white lip at the opening. The other has a pink-tinged binge shell.

A snail hangs from the underside of a palm frond.

A snail crawling on a branch, as viewed from behind. The snail’s shell is pale lemon yellow near the opening, with an ever-widening dark brown stripe around the spiral towards the shell tip.

Snail crawling on the underside of a leaf. The shell is light beige with a dark brown lip at the shell opening and a dark brown brown stripe around the spiral. The snail’s head is dark gray with long tentacles, and its tail is light gray.

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Teresa Rose Osborne, PhD @trosborne.bsky.social · Aug 26

Samoana fragilis (Family Partulidae, Chamorro: akaleha'), found on Rota Island in the Northern Mariana Islands and on Guam

These snails have translucent shells, so color differences are from their flesh, not their shells

#InverteFest #JoyOfMolluscs 🐌

Snail crawling up a screw pine leaf. The flesh under the largest shell whorl is bright yellow with thin, dark brown lines. Under smaller whorls, the snail is mostly dark brown with yellow splotches. The snail’s head is dark gray, and its tail is pale gray.

Snail crawling up a tree trunk. The snail’s upper tentacles and the top of its head are dark gray, and its lower tentacles, foot, and tail are pale beige. The flesh under the snail’s shell is dark brown with large, pale gold splotches.

Snail hanging from the underside of a leaf. Under the largest shell whorl, the snail has large, golden splotches on dark brown. Under smaller whorls, the snail is mostly dark brown with smaller golden spots.

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Trevor Padgett @trevorpadgett.bsky.social · Aug 25

Semi-snails (Megaustenia app.) of Vietnam: an evolutionary link between slugs (no shell) & snails (full shell).

Their shells are thin & incomplete, & need to be covered by their skin ('mantle') which offers protection, camouflage, & secretes calcium carbonate to build more shell.

#Vietnam #snail

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Peter Dearden @peterkdearden.bsky.social · Aug 21

Hi folks. @whenua.bsky.social and I wrote a thing about my favourite snails. bioprotection.org.nz/fridge-to-fr...

Fridge to Freedom | Bioprotection Aotearoa

You may have recently read about the Department of Conservation spending around $100,000 per year for the past 4 years to house and manage snails. Now, these aren’t just any...

bioprotection.org.nz

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Stephen H Kawai, PhD @stephenhkawai.bsky.social · Jan 31

Often referred to as the world's most beautiful snail, Polymita picta is a variable species presenting a vast array of colours and patterns. They are now protected in their native Cuba to prevent overcollecting as craft material.
#snails #snail #mollusk #snailsky #gastropod #gastropoda #sciart

A square array of Polymita picta snails. They present colours from white, beige, orange, yellow and red, to nearly totally black. Many bear bands following the spirals which can be white, black and white or complex mixtures thereof.

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Anthony Ricciardi @ecoinvasions.bsky.social · Aug 19

"Native to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the Americas...M. strigata has become a notorious invader in parts of the United State... and Southeast Asia such as the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. In 2019, it was first recorded in India’s Kerala backwaters." news.mongabay.com/2025/08/as-f...

As fast-spreading mussel sweeps across Asia, Sri Lanka faces new invasive threat

COLOMBO — The discovery of the black mussel (Mytella strigata) in coastal shrimp farms in Sri Lanka’s northwestern coastal belt has raised concerns among scientists, who warn against its potential to ...

news.mongabay.com

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Justin Gerlach @jstgerlach.bsky.social · Aug 13

Our paper on the extinct Chilonopsis land snails of St Helena has just been published in @ejtaxonomy.bsky.social. We review all the old material, including what we could find of Charles Darwin's collection, and describe a new species from ongoing palaeontological work
doi.org/10.5852/ejt....

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Dr. Brendan Anderson @fossilsndcoffee.bsky.social · Aug 13

My blog post on the process for creating a natural history museum exhibit is up. (Featuring many mollusks of course!)

www.priweb.org/blog-post/ma...

🦑🐚🐌🐙🦪 #invertebrates #museum #fossils #sciCom 🧪

Making Mollusks Marvelous: Designing Museum Exhibits — Paleontological Research Institution

By Brendan Anderson There are many avenues for communicating science, but one of the most trusted avenues have been museum exhibits (Merritt, 2019). Those who have visited museums in recent years c...

www.priweb.org

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🪲Systematics and Biodiversity🦠 @nhmsystbiodiv.bsky.social · Aug 5

For #TaxonomyTuesday have a look at the variation in shells and opercula of the freshwater snail 𝙎𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙪𝙡𝙘𝙤𝙨𝙥𝙞𝙧𝙖 𝙢𝙞𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙞 sp. nov. and a putative hybrid

Read the full study published in SAB by Sawada et al. (2025): buff.ly/YEb6YbY

#Biodiversity #NHM #NaturalHistory #Evolution #Snails #Ecology

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🪲Systematics and Biodiversity🦠 @nhmsystbiodiv.bsky.social · Mar 19

Shell flat lay of several Amphidromus species from Bangladesh 🐚

This is figure 4 from the S&B article by Saito et al.: buff.ly/42BzZ0Z

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🦕Journal of Systematic Palaeontology🦴 @journalsystpal.bsky.social · Apr 29

Congratulations to our 2024 Outstanding Paper Prize winners! 🥳👏

@barankarapunar.bsky.social
@hoehna.bsky.social

You can read their paper on Pleurotomariida (gastropod) phylogeny, Open Access, here🔓:
www.tandfonline.com/journals/tjs...

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