Land Snails and Slugs

This section on Indiana land snails and slugs is divided into three units.

Snail Structure - Start here to learn the major important structures of land snails needed for identification. This presentation is deeper than the Quick Guide as this covers more species. 

The Identification Key - This is a picture key, basically, that first separates land snails by major features. Then, within smaller groups, it continues to further divide until an individual species (or small group) is reached. At the end of each sequence (the tips of the branches of the identification "tree"), you are guided to a page with information on a single species or several species in a group.

The Species List -This is a complete (more or less) list of land snail species or groups likely to be found in Indiana with descriptions, images (or links to images) and state and USA distribution maps. Names at the species level - or genus or family (depends on the group) are linked to the same pages as are linked to at the tip of the identification tree. This is a direct way to get to your species if you have a good hunch what it is.

Non-native Species - This is a list with brief descriptions of the non-native snails and slugs likely found in Indiana. A few groups are also listed in the "Species List" above,  but others are not as they are less widely found.

Kansas Species - An updated list of KS species - my old stomping grounds.

The information used to develop this site comes from merging what I have learned, understood, and applied from the important and in-depth information of the comprehensive works of others. Most important have been the works on West Virginia (Dourson 2015), Kentucky (Dourson 2010), Missouri (Oesch et al. 2013), the Land Snails and Slugs of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States (Hotoop et al. 2020), The Distributions of the Native Land Mollusks of the Eastern United States (Hubricht 1985), Nekola and Coles (2010), and How to Know the Eastern Land Snails (Burch 1962). As authors usually say, errors are my own. I really need another 5 or so years and hundreds of specimens to come anywhere close to what those folks have done. This is my attempt to get something started that the casual observer can use.