Brown-lipped Snail

Cepaea nemoralis is among the largest and, because of its bright colouration, one of the best-known snails in Western Europe. The colour of the shell is highly variable; it ranges from brown, through pink, to yellow or even whitish, with or without one to five dark-brown bands. Names for many colour variants were coined in the nineteenth century but this system has been replaced by an independent scoring of shell colour and the presence/absence and fusion of individual bands numbered 1 to 5. The thickened and slightly out-turned apertural lip of adults is usually dark brown, but can be white in some regions. The umbilicus is closed in adults but narrowly open in juveniles. The shell surface is semi-glossy. An adult shell consists of 4½–5½ whorls, with a width of 18–25 millimetres (3⁄4–1 in) and a height of 12–22 mm (1⁄2–7⁄8 in).

Similar species. Cepaea nemoralis is closely related to Cepaea hortensis. They share much the same habitat and exhibit a similar range of shell colours and banding patterns. Cepaea nemoralis tends to grow larger, but usually the species can most easily be recognised by the colour of the lip of adult shells. In a high proportion of regions, C. nemoralis consistently has a dark-brown lip to its shell, whilst C. hortensis has a white lip.

In areas where lip colour is variable, dissection is necessary. A cross-section of the love dart of C. …

The native distribution of C. nemoralis is from Western and Northern Europe to Central Europe, but it has been spreading eastwards especially over the last few decades. Thus it is known from most of the Iberian Peninsula, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, southern Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bosnia, Croatia, and the northern half of Italy. In Central and Eastern Europe it has spread particularly along the Baltic coast (e.g. in Poland, Latvia, Estonia, southern Finland, the east coast of Sweden) but also now elsewhere in Poland, and in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. In Slovakia it was still known only from a single garden centre by 2020. The first reports from Romania and Bulgaria are each of a single very local occurrence within a city. At the northern edge of its range,C. nemoralis is rare and scattered in northern Scotland, where it has been introduced. It is not found in the Hebrides, Orkney or Shetland. It seems to have been affected by air pollution and soil acidification in some parts of England. Starting in 1857, there have been multiple introductions to North America, where it now occurs widely in Canada (from British Columbia to Newfoundland; in Ontario it is a pest of vineyards) and in the northeastern United States, with further occurrences further south (e.g. …

This is a very common and widespread species in Western Europe, occupying a wide range of habitats from coastal dunes to woodlands with full canopy cover, including gardens and abandoned land. In Eastern Europe, where it is a new arrival, it has turned up particularly in urban areas and other disturbed habitats. It can be found up to an altitude of 1,600 metres (5,200 ft) in the Alps, 1,800 m (5,900 ft) in the Pyrenees, 900 m (3,000 ft) in Wales, 600 m (2,000 ft) in Scotland. Density of adults is often of the order of 2 per square metre. This species feeds mainly on dead or senescent plants. It prefers broad-leaved plants over grasses. Although mostly not a pest of crops, it can be a nuisance in vineyards because it is inadvertently picked with the grapes. Like all pulmonate land snails, it is a hermaphrodite, and this species must mate to produce fertile eggs. Mating tends to be concentrated in late spring and early summer, though it can continue through the autumn. The snails may store the sperm they receive from their partner for some time, and individual broods can have mixed paternity. In Britain it lays clutches of 30–50 (in France 40–80) oval eggs between June and August (in France May–October, in West France until November). The size of the egg is 3.1 × 2.6 mm or egg diameter can be 2.3–3.0 mm. …