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jkfni.bsky.social
Junn Kitt Foon
@jkfni.bsky.social
42 followers 130 following 2 posts
studying 🐌🐌🐌
RG: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Junn-Foon
LN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkfoon
Web: https://sites.google.com/view/jkfoon/home
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jkfni.bsky.social
Junn Kitt Foon @jkfni.bsky.social · Jun 11
It’s been 5 years since a presumed extinct snail species was rediscovered. Now, after a successful ex-situ breeding program at Taronga Zoo, scientists are bringing their descendants back home. australian.museum/blog/amri-ne...
Homecoming! A journey from stress to success for Norfolk Island snails
It’s been five years since Norfolk Island local, Mark Scott, showed Malacologists from the Australian Museum a small living population of a snail species previously feared to be extinct. After a succe...
australian.museum
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
snailseyeview.bsky.social
Today’s #AtoZ is Enteroxenos, an odd genus in an odd family (Eulimidae).

We don’t think of snails as parasites, but parasitism has evolved multiple times. There are LOTS of parasitic snails – both ecto (outside) and endo (inside).

So maybe eulimids aren’t that odd after all.

Pics coming. (1/7)
March 5, 2025 at 1:11 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
francinefox.bsky.social
Progress made on my big oil painting of nautiluses. 🧡

#nautilus #allonautilus #marinelife #deepseacreatures #mollusks #cephalopods #oilpainting #wildlifeart #animalart 🐡 🦑
Detail shot of a nautilus painted with oil on canvas. The background is a vibrant blue with copper mica scraped over it.
October 14, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
francinefox.bsky.social
My second nautilus is much closer to done after today’s session at the easel. Next weekend, the allonautilus!

#nautilus #allonautilus #marinelife #deepseacreatures #mollusks #cephalopods #oilpainting #wildlifeart #animalart 🐡 🦑
In-progress painting of a nautilus in profile view.
October 20, 2025 at 2:23 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
zooniverse.bsky.social
✨ SNAIL SCRIBE ARCHIVE - this new 🐌 Zooniverse transcription project is all about molluscan biodiversity data. It seeks to promote the conservation and critical scientific research of these under-appreciated animals! www.zooniverse.org/projects/ske...
Cartoon snail mascot for Zooniverse project: Snail Scribe Archive
October 7, 2025 at 2:18 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
jfcudennec.bsky.social
More arcaheological limpets for #MolluscMonday 💙

In late prehistory HawaÏ (late 1500s/ early 1600s), shrines were built next to houses, and filled delicate food as offerings, including some neat limpet stacks, some still in their original position of deposition.

Source : tinyurl.com/dbjurdw9
Photo of the area described as a shrine : a ring of small boulders and cobbles, where the western portion was excavated and then backfilled with clean sand detail of the shrine surface showing two clusters of limpet (Cellana sandwicensis) offerings in their original position of placement. Other visible items include fine-grained basalt flakes, helmet urchin spines (Colobocentrotus atratus), blue-black urchin test or body parts (Echinothrix diadema), rock snail (Drupa sp.), cowry (Cypraea sp.), shark or ray vertebra (Elasmobranch), and spiny puffer (Diodon sp.) mouth parts. Scale bars are 10 cm. Photos: M. Weisler.
September 22, 2025 at 8:17 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
trosborne.bsky.social
Happy #MolluscMonday!
Snail shells in traditional Pacific arts:
🐚In the Marianas, Chamorro & Refaluwasch people used akaleha' tree snails to make beaded bags & jewelry
🌏Many Pacific cultures use seashells for islands in stick chart maps, combining art, science, & geography
#JoyOfMolluscs
Akaleha' shell purse. Stick chart of the Marshall Islands.
September 21, 2025 at 10:11 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
meganweber.bsky.social
Did you miss our webinar about mercury levels in game fish from zebra mussel infested waters last month! If so, you're in luck because the recording is now live. @maisrc.bsky.social researcher, Gretchen Hansen shared a great presentation about this research!
z.umn.edu/MercuryRising
#bioinvasions
Webinar: Mercury Rising: How Zebra Mussels are Changing Fish Contaminants
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
z.umn.edu
September 4, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
ricciardilab.bsky.social
Meet the freshwater mussel Margaritifera margaritifera. It can live for up to 130 years. It uses salmonid fishes as hosts for its larval stage. It is endangered in Europe but stable in Atlantic North America. It belongs in a different family than most other N. American & European freshwater mussels.
September 4, 2025 at 11:37 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
dantheclamman.blog
Yo dawg we heard you like shells...the Stimpson chimney clam is a shell in a shell. These little bivalves bore into loose shells, building little chimneys of cemented shell fragments once they grow past the thickness of their host shell. (223)
Photo by the legendary José Leal, Bailey Matthews Shell Museum. Chimney clams poke out of a sand dollar like little white chimneys Photo from jaxshells.org. a chimney clam chimney coming out of a gastropod shell features many little cemented shelly fragments An ark shell has many borings, and inside some little igloo like housings can be seen
August 31, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
squamiferum.bsky.social
[New Paper] We found a SECOND SNAIL with HARD SCALES on the foot -- Ifremeria nautilei lives in deep-sea hot vents and makes chitinous scales not by secretion but by cell differentiation, like our own skin!

@royalsocietypublishing.org Proceedings B, OPEN ACCESS: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...
August 27, 2025 at 4:08 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
journalsystpal.bsky.social
Did you know.. Molluscs are the second most diverse phylum and possibly the most disparate! 🐚🦪🐌🐙🦑

A recent study by Karapunar et al. (2024) documents the phylogeny of Pleurotomariidae, the longest-living gastropod group, comparing different shell characters: buff.ly/2pEof6e @spissatella.bsky.social
August 27, 2025 at 9:16 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
inaturalist.bsky.social
We're big fans of snails over here. Here's a species that has less than 10 iNaturalist observations: Sheldonia cotyledonis!

📷 cliffdorse on iNaturalist
📍 South Africa
🔗: www.inaturalist.org/observations...
#ObservationOfTheDay #InverteFest
An orangey-brown snail with a striking white and brown shell crawls over a rock. An orangey-brown snail with a striking white and brown shell crawls over a rock.
August 27, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
dantheclamman.blog
The mangrove jingle shell lives attached to the lower leaves of mangroves! It is not actually air living, and still needs to be immersed by the tides occasionally to survive. Still, I consider it a sign of hope that the clams are working on invading our lands and it is only a matter of time. (209)
A flat golden shell is attached to a mangrove leaf. Photo by the legendary Ria Tan for Wild Singapore
August 26, 2025 at 2:45 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
spissatella.bsky.social
Enigmonia bognorensis, from the early Eocene of Hampshire UK. 55mya or so, the southern UK (and northern France) were a hot tropical sea, and at the margins were mangroves - and mangrove jingle shells!
A long ovoid brown shiny fossil bivalve sits in a white person's hand, showing the interior with one big central muscle scar An oval brown shiny fossil bivalve sits in a white person's hand, showing the exterior with its unusual central beak and faint concentric and radial ribbing - it looks a little like a limpet
August 26, 2025 at 12:40 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
mdahirel.bsky.social
It's #InverteFest, so it's time to correct my forgetting to post about my latest paper from a couple months ago. It has *double* the invertebrates: snails, and their parasites! doi.org/10.1093/cz/z...
How does urbanization shape shell phenotype, behavior, and parasite prevalence in the snail Cornu aspersum?
Abstract. Urbanization is a complex and multivariate environmental change, leading to habitat fragmentation and loss, changes in local climate, soil imperv
doi.org
August 26, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
trosborne.bsky.social
Happy #MolluscMonday of #InverteFest!
Please enjoy these Partula lutaensis (Family Partulidae, Chamorro: akaleha' Luta)
These snails are only found on Rota Island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands 🏝️
#JoyOfMolluscs #MolluskMonday 1/2
Two snails hang next to each other on a leaf. One has a yellow shell with a white lip at the opening. The other has a pink-tinged binge shell. A snail hangs from the underside of a palm frond. A snail crawling on a branch, as viewed from behind. The snail’s shell is pale lemon yellow near the opening, with an ever-widening dark brown stripe around the spiral towards the shell tip. Snail crawling on the underside of a leaf. The shell is light beige with a dark brown lip at the shell opening and a dark brown brown stripe around the spiral. The snail’s head is dark gray with long tentacles, and its tail is light gray.
August 25, 2025 at 12:06 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
trosborne.bsky.social
Samoana fragilis (Family Partulidae, Chamorro: akaleha'), found on Rota Island in the Northern Mariana Islands and on Guam

These snails have translucent shells, so color differences are from their flesh, not their shells

#InverteFest #JoyOfMolluscs 🐌
Snail crawling up a screw pine leaf. The flesh under the largest shell whorl is bright yellow with thin, dark brown lines. Under smaller whorls, the snail is mostly dark brown with yellow splotches. The snail’s head is dark gray, and its tail is pale gray. Snail crawling up a tree trunk. The snail’s upper tentacles and the top of its head are dark gray, and its lower tentacles, foot, and tail are pale beige. The flesh under the snail’s shell is dark brown with large, pale gold splotches. Snail hanging from the underside of a leaf. Under the largest shell whorl, the snail has large, golden splotches on dark brown. Under smaller whorls, the snail is mostly dark brown with smaller golden spots.
August 26, 2025 at 12:12 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
trevorpadgett.bsky.social
Semi-snails (Megaustenia app.) of Vietnam: an evolutionary link between slugs (no shell) & snails (full shell).

Their shells are thin & incomplete, & need to be covered by their skin ('mantle') which offers protection, camouflage, & secretes calcium carbonate to build more shell.

#Vietnam #snail
August 25, 2025 at 11:07 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
peterkdearden.bsky.social
Hi folks. @whenua.bsky.social and I wrote a thing about my favourite snails. bioprotection.org.nz/fridge-to-fr...
Fridge to Freedom | Bioprotection Aotearoa
You may have recently read about the Department of Conservation spending around $100,000 per year for the past 4 years to house and manage snails. Now, these aren’t just any...
bioprotection.org.nz
August 21, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
stephenhkawai.bsky.social
Often referred to as the world's most beautiful snail, Polymita picta is a variable species presenting a vast array of colours and patterns. They are now protected in their native Cuba to prevent overcollecting as craft material.
#snails #snail #mollusk #snailsky #gastropod #gastropoda #sciart
A square array of Polymita picta snails. They present colours from white, beige, orange, yellow and red, to nearly totally black. Many bear bands following the spirals which can be white, black and white or complex mixtures thereof.
January 31, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
ecoinvasions.bsky.social
"Native to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the Americas...M. strigata has become a notorious invader in parts of the United State... and Southeast Asia such as the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. In 2019, it was first recorded in India’s Kerala backwaters." news.mongabay.com/2025/08/as-f...
As fast-spreading mussel sweeps across Asia, Sri Lanka faces new invasive threat
COLOMBO — The discovery of the black mussel (Mytella strigata) in coastal shrimp farms in Sri Lanka’s northwestern coastal belt has raised concerns among scientists, who warn against its potential to ...
news.mongabay.com
August 19, 2025 at 4:59 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
jstgerlach.bsky.social
Our paper on the extinct Chilonopsis land snails of St Helena has just been published in @ejtaxonomy.bsky.social. We review all the old material, including what we could find of Charles Darwin's collection, and describe a new species from ongoing palaeontological work
doi.org/10.5852/ejt....
August 13, 2025 at 7:17 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
fossilsndcoffee.bsky.social
My blog post on the process for creating a natural history museum exhibit is up. (Featuring many mollusks of course!)

www.priweb.org/blog-post/ma...

🦑🐚🐌🐙🦪 #invertebrates #museum #fossils #sciCom 🧪
Making Mollusks Marvelous: Designing Museum Exhibits — Paleontological Research Institution
By Brendan Anderson There are many avenues for communicating science, but one of the most trusted avenues have been museum exhibits (Merritt, 2019). Those who have visited museums in recent years c...
www.priweb.org
August 13, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
nhmsystbiodiv.bsky.social
For #TaxonomyTuesday have a look at the variation in shells and opercula of the freshwater snail 𝙎𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙪𝙡𝙘𝙤𝙨𝙥𝙞𝙧𝙖 𝙢𝙞𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙞 sp. nov. and a putative hybrid

Read the full study published in SAB by Sawada et al. (2025): buff.ly/YEb6YbY

#Biodiversity #NHM #NaturalHistory #Evolution #Snails #Ecology
August 5, 2025 at 7:01 AM
Reposted by Junn Kitt Foon
nhmsystbiodiv.bsky.social
Shell flat lay of several Amphidromus species from Bangladesh 🐚

This is figure 4 from the S&B article by Saito et al.: buff.ly/42BzZ0Z
March 19, 2025 at 4:46 PM