It was my ambition for long to visit KMTR. I have heard a lot of field stories from Ganesh, Ganesan and Soubadra and finally I got a chance to visit in Nov 2005 and again in Jan 2007. I tagged along with others to the field and everybody was looking up at the canopy birds or butterflies or LTMs. On contrary, I was busy searching forest floor for land snails. My first hand knowledge on land snails of KMTR came from Fauna of British India. It mentions about the presence of 30 species with about 26 are Western Ghats endemic and half a dozen are endemic only to KMTR. I was looking for two groups of land snails viz., Tortulosa and Corilla. The former is represented by five and latter is represented by one species in the Western Ghats as against 25 and 10 species respectively in Sri Lanka. Tortulosa and Corilla have Gondwanan origin dating back to 100 million years. Fossil Corilla dating back to 97 million years has been recorded from Ariyaloor, in Tamil Nadu. Tortulosa and Corilla are predominantly found in high altitude evergreen forests of the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka. Corillas inhabit litter and soil layers and Tortulosa on the other hand generally found in the canopy. In spite of carrying out an extensive survey I was disappointed for not able to find a single shell of either of these species. Nature always has a lot of surprises for us. As I was busy hunting in the forest for snails, Chetan spotted a beautiful big green snail, surprisingly right next to the main road. After going through the literature, I was convinced that it is in fact a new species belonging to the genus Euplecta. This is the only member of this group which is brightly coloured. There may be more such treasure to be unearthed….
