Vertigo genesii, common name

Common name

A common name of a taxon or organism is a name in general use within a community; it is often contrasted with the scientific name for the same organism...

 the round-mouthed whorl snail, is a species of small land snail

Snail

Snail is a common name applied to most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have coiled shells in the adult stage. When the word is used in its most general sense, it includes sea snails, land snails and freshwater snails. The word snail without any qualifier is however more often...

 from the family

Family (biology)

In biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the...

 Vertiginidae

Vertiginidae

Vertiginidae is a family of minute, air-breathing land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs or micromollusks in the superfamily Pupilloidea.- Distribution :...

.

Shell description

The shell

Gastropod shell

The gastropod shell is a shell which is part of the body of a gastropod or snail, one kind of mollusc. The gastropod shell is an external skeleton or exoskeleton, which serves not only for muscle attachment, but also for protection from predators and from mechanical damage...

 is very small, ovate, obtuse, indistinctly, spaced striate, glossy purplish brown. The shell has 4½ whorls

Whorl (mollusc)

A whorl is a single, complete 360° revolution or turn in the spiral growth of a mollusc shell. A spiral configuration of the shell is found in of numerous gastropods, but it is also found in shelled cephalopods including Nautilus, Spirula and the large extinct subclass of cephalopods known as the...

, that are rather convex, high, rapidly increasing, joined by a somewhat impressed suture, the penult large, almost ventricose. Umbilical opening is moderate.

The aperture

Aperture (mollusc)

The aperture is an opening in certain kinds of mollusc shells: it is the main opening of the shell, where part of the body of the animal emerges for locomotion, feeding, etc....

 is semirotund, nearly quadratic, without any folds. Peristome is scarcely expanded, thickened liplike, bordered with bluish black, the margins are connected by a very weak callus, the right margin is arched at the insertion.

The width of the adult shell is 1.03-1.20 mm, the height is 1.63-2.00 mm.

Anatomy

The animal body color is raven-black. The tentacles are short, contracted in the middle.

Distribution and conservation status

• IUCN red list
  IUCN Red List
  The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species , founded in 1963, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature is the world's main authority on the conservation status of species...
  
   - conservation dependent
  Conservation Dependent
  Conservation Dependent was an IUCN category assigned to species or lower taxa which were dependent on conservation efforts to prevent the taxon becoming threatened with extinction...
  
  
• It is mentioned in Annex II of the European Union's
  European Union
  The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
  
   Habitats Directive.
• British Isles (in United Kingdom only): Great Britain. It is endangered in Great Britain and it is listed in List of endangered species in the British Isles.
• continental Europe: Finland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Sweden, Switzerland.

External links

• http://www.animalbase.uni-goettingen.de/zooweb/servlet/AnimalBase/home/species?id=1686