Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I am preparing to write my background paper and I need as much information as I can get about snails in the Polygyrdae family. Specifically, I plan on writing about 1. Mesodon thyrodius
2.Neohelix albolabris
3.Oxychilus draparnaudi
4.Haplotrema concavum
5.Cepaea nemoralis
I want to know about their anatomy, diet, distribution in America and pretty much anything else you can offer me. Thanks!

Hi,

You can easily do research using Google.com to get more information than you can possibly use on this topic. For example, here is a web search result list for the first snail on your list:

http://www.google.com/search?q=mesodon+ ... 1I7GGLL_en

Google searches can answer almost any question you can ask, and is probably the easiest way to find any answer you need. (Other search engines like Bing or others may work well too.)

Good luck with the project.

Barrett L. Tomlinson

You can also find abstracts about scientific papers on the species you're interested in (from recent decades, at least) using Pubmed. Go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez and search for "Cepaea," for example, and you'll find over one hundred abstracts, some of which may be of interest to you. Full text access to the complete articles usually requires a library subscription to the journal, but is free for some articles in PubMed Central.

Also, the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org) is an ongoing effort to build a comprehensive gateway on the web to information about all the species on Earth. It's a work in progress and most species don't have too much information on their pages yet, but there is some info there for some of your species of interest. For example, there's a page on Cepaea with links to maps showing its distribution, classification, a wikipedia article, notes on its conservations status, etc.

Hope you find this useful.

Best of luck,

Will