[Taxacom] Identifying Land Snails and Slugs in Canada:, Introduced Species and Native Genera

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Alienists & systematists,

With regrets for the inevitable cross-postings to those with interests 
parallel to ours, I'm very pleased to be able to announce:

Grimm, F. Wayne, Robert G. Forsyth, Frederick W. Schueler, & Aleta
Karstad. 2009 [2010]. Identifying Land Snails and Slugs in Canada:
Introduced Species and Native Genera. Canadian Food Inspection Agency,
Ottawa. iv+168 pp.
http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/plaveg/pestrava/escarge.shtml

...and

Grimm, F. Wayne, Robert G. Forsyth, Frederick W. Schueler, & Aleta
Karstad. 2009 [2010]. Identification des escargots et des limaces
terrestres au Canada: Espèces introduites et genres indigènes. Agence
canadienne d'inspection des alimentes. Ottawa. iv+168 pp. (translation
of Identifying Land Snails and Slugs in Canada, edited by Isabelle
Picard). http://www.inspection.gc.ca/francais/plaveg/pestrava/escargf.shtml

These are "targeted to academics, master gardeners, hobby collectors and 
CFIA and Canada Border Services Agency inspectors," and we're told 
they're available at no cost from CFRA by calling 1-800-442-2342. 
Presumably, such a call would have to be made during business hours, 
eastern (Ottawa) time. CD copies are also available; I haven't opened 
the CD to see how big a file it is.

We don't know how many copies CFIA is going to print, but as the 
perpetrators, we'll shyly say that the hard-copy versions are 
spectacular, leading off with a picture of the pink Cepaea nemoralis
with the pale mid-axial band that we found crawling across the 
Mississagi Lighthouse campground, 9.5 km WSW Meldrum Bay, and winding up 
with the Limax maximus we found along the Dyers Bay Rd, 0.2 km SW Dyers 
Bay settlement, inspecting the portrait Aleta had painted of it.

This has been a long haul since the earliest documents proposing it, 
which date, on my hard drive, back to 1997, and even a long haul since 
Wayne unexpectedly died in 2005.  Our profound thanks to Frank Ross & 
Donna Richoux for supporting this project, and then to CFIA for taking 
it up, to Robert and Isabelle for providing the real malacology, and to 
Judy Courteau and Matt Keevil for all the help with field work and 
curation. We are, of course, eager to learn of any errors or omissions, 
since one big thing preparing this book has taught us is how thinly our 
knowledge of introduced terrestrial Gastropods is spread across the 
immensity of Canada.

There's an appendix of frequently intercepted species, and the reader 
will notice that there are many introduced species which Wayne Grimm 
included in his original manuscript, but for which we could not find 
documentation, or precise localities, in his papers or collections after 
his death. We're continuing to try to find the locations and populations 
these were based on, and to provide specimens to those who are working 
on phylogeography who may be able to show that synanthropic Canadian 
lineages of some genera are or are not introduced from Eurasian 
populations. The second big thing preparing this book has taught us is 
in how many genera the taxonomy of Canadian populations is tenuous or 
confused.

This is the first work to treat the entire Canadian fauna of terrestrial 
Gastropods, and we hope it will spark a great increase of interest in 
the life history, ecological roles, and systematics of Canadian land 
snails & slugs. See http://pinicola.ca/slugwork.htm and 
http://www.aletakarstad.com/category/slugs/ for some of what we're 
doing, and http://www.mollus.ca/ for Robert's more focusedly terrestrial 
malacology.

fred.
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          Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
Thirty Years Later Expedition - http://pinicola.ca/thirty/
Longterm ecological monitoring - http://fragileinheritance.org/
Portraits of light - http://www.aletakarstad.com/
Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills - http://pinicola.ca/mudpup1.htm
     RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
   on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
    (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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