A Field Guide to the Snails of Lord Howe Island

11 Past research Lord Howe Island was discovered by Lieutenant Henry Ball in 1788, en route from Sydney to Norfolk Island. After its discovery, the island was used by whalers and passing ships as a place to stop for water and food, and to add to the available food supply, pigs and goats were released. The first settlers did not arrive until 1834. Expeditions in 1852 and 1853 led to the first land snails being described in 1854 and 1855. The first scientific expedition was in 1882, when scientists from several institutions (including the Australian Museum) visited, leading to more species descriptions. In 1910 ornithologist Roy Bell settled on Norfolk Island and spent several years working on both Norfolk Island and Lord Howe Island. During this time, he collected widely across Lord Howe Island, scaling Mt Lidgbird and Mt Gower and reaching localities across the whole island. These collections formed the basis of a study by Iredale (1944), which is still the most comprehensive and most recent overview of the group as a whole to date. Many local islanders acted as guides on these field expeditions, leading to species and genera named after local families, including names such as Innesoconcha (Innes’s shell), Dignamoconcha (Dignam’s shell) and Goweroconcha wilsoni (Gower Wilson’s Pinwheel Snail). Expeditions made by Australian Museum scientists in the 1970s and 1980s were the catalyst for conservation programs such as the eradication of goats, pigs and cats. Surveys in the early 2000s culminated in the rediscovery of Pseudocharopa whiteleggei , at the time thought to be extinct, and led to the listing of five land snails species as Endangered or Critically Endangered, and a revision of the helicarionid fauna of the island (Hyman & Ponder, 2010). More recently, several surveys by the authors in the period 2016- 2020 have formed the foundation for an ongoing revision of the Lord Howe Island land snails. The Lord Howe Island land snails have never before been presented in a comprehensive illustrated guide, although a selection of species was included in Volume One of Australian Land Snails (Stanisic, Shea, Potter & Griffiths, 2010). We have included a bibliography on page 157, giving the full details of any publications cited in the text, as well as other relevant publications that we consulted when putting together this guide.