Early April found Amata Hinkle at the Paint Rock Forest Research Center. Hinkle had visited Sharp-Bingham Mountain Preserve weeks earlier for a training exercise and took an excursion to a creek. “A rock screamed, ‘Turn me over! Turn me over!’” Hinkle said. She complied and spotted minute translucent snails clinging to the stone.
Hinkle, who works with the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Dr. Matthew Niemiller, found the lack of pigment reminiscent of cave snails and resembling the genus Fontigens, of which there is only one known species in Alabama. But the specimen didn’t look all that similar to the current documented species, so Hinkle wanted to see if this was a range extension of a known snail from outside the state or yet another unknown species to document at Paint Rock. Hinkle and a small team from UAH ventured out to take a closer look at this curious aquatic snail.
As a living laboratory, the Paint Rock Forest Research Center offers plentiful opportunities to discover and study biodiversity across the system, even in our smallest gastropod mollusks living in the foundations—serving as decomposers and nutrient dispersers.
In addition to its fish, caves, mussels, trees, and wildflowers, Paint Rock has long been famous for its exceptional and globally significant snail diversity. Much of this is due to the stones—particularly limestone, which has allowed creatures with calcium-based shells to proliferate in unusual ways. While the total number of snail species is still awaiting a coordinated research effort, single-day sampling efforts have turned up almost 100 species of land-based snails, not including the aquatic and cave-based snails, which may be just as numerous.
Many of these snails are known only from relatively small areas in Paint Rock, and it sometimes seems as if each drainage can claim its own unique species. Amata’s curiosity—and the compelling call of the stones—provides us another key example of this reality that we look forward to continuing to unravel.
By Kelsey Barnett-Fischels, Communications Director