Abstract
Pacific Island land snails are highly endangered due in part to misguided biological control programs employing the alien predator Euglandina rosea. Its victims include the fabled Society Island partulid tree snail fauna, but a few members have avoided extirpation in the wild, including the distinctly white-shelled Partula hyalina. High albedo shell coloration can facilitate land snail survival in open, sunlit environments and we hypothesized that P. hyalina has a solar refuge from the predator. We developed a 2.2 × 4.8 × 2.4 mm smart solar sensor to test this hypothesis and found that extant P. hyalina populations on Tahiti are restricted to forest edge habitats, where they are routinely exposed to significantly higher solar radiation levels than those endured by the predator. Long-term survival of this species on Tahiti may require proactive conservation of its forest edge solar refugia and our study demonstrates the utility of miniaturized smart sensors in invertebrate ecology and conservation.
Highlights
Pacific Island land snails are highly endangered due in part to misguided biological control programs employing the alien predator Euglandina rosea
One Society Islands species, Partula hyalina, exhibits by far the best low altitude survival with small, scattered populations enduring in 31 Tahitian valleys[13]
Shade is less available in more open, sunlit, environments and land snails with high albedo shell coloration appear have an enhanced ability to colonize such environments[17,18,19,20,21,22]
Summary
Pacific Island land snails are highly endangered due in part to misguided biological control programs employing the alien predator Euglandina rosea. The solar refuge hypothesis[13] predicts that surviving populations of P. hyalina will be restricted to forest-edge habitats where the ambient solar irradiation conditions are, during periods of maximum sunlight, significantly higher than those tolerated by foraging Euglandina rosea.
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