Raheem-2014-Western Ghats Land Snails-1-294

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Preface
The land snails of the Western Ghats constitute a unique fauna that has been neglected for
many years. Their study is likely to have a significant impact on ongoing and future efforts to
recognise biologically-diverse habitats and set conservation priorities, and they are worthy of
conservation in their own right. Snails can act as powerful research tools in a number of
biological disciplines, with the potential to contribute significantly to our understanding of
the patterns and processes of evolution over a wide spectrum of temporal and spatial scales.
The legacy of 19 th century malacological pioneers has resulted in Indian snails being among
the richest treasures in the land-snail collections at the Natural History Museum, London and
the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge. Harnessing museum collections for identifying
and naming species continues to be the essential first step towards understanding and
conserving species. As storehouses of biological diversity museums clearly need to respond
to the biodiversity crisis in a number of ways. Systematics provides the foundation for
understanding living diversity, and new ways of understanding, recording and conserving
living diversity need to be utilised and developed. However, there is also an urgent need to
deliver basic tools for identifying biodiversity. The publication of images of currentlyrecognised
species provides a greatly needed and useful resource that will hopefully stimulate
the study of the Western Ghats’ snail fauna and of South Asian land snails in general.
It is widely considered that human population growth and utilisation of the planet to
satisfy human needs and voracity is resulting in the sixth mass extinction and the largest
extinction event for the past 65 Ma (Ceballos, 2010; Laurance, 2014). The scale of
extinctions is controversial (Lomborg, 1998; Friel, 2010), but land snails appear to have
suffered disproportionately. Reviews of the literature (Naggs et al., 2006; Régnier et al.,
2009) indicate that recorded extinctions of land snails exceed those of all other animal groups
combined. Such figures are not a reflection of reality. Rather, they demonstrate the value of
snails as informative research organisms. There can be no doubt that a far greater number of
arthropods have become extinct, but the majority of these have disappeared without trace,
whereas snails may leave their shells as a record. This was recognised by Charles Darwin
when he spent a few days on the Atlantic Ocean island of St Helena on the return leg of the