Exciting times! I contacted the Freshwater Habitats Trust to ask about the snails I’ve got after I took a look on their page on snails. They told me my snails are not the endangered Glutinous snail but could be the Acute Bladder snail (Physella acuta). ‘Spiral snail’ might be Margined ram’s-horn or the Keeled ram’s-horn snail depending on the edge of the shell (my photos were not clear enough). For further information they directed me to The Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland .
The snails were mating yet again (left in the photo below) and I now have three patches on the glass where eggs have been deposited. I think the patches shown in the photos below are different ones, deposited just days apart (the patch on the right in the photo below was being deposited at the time of the photo; you can see a tiny dark dot inside each egg):
And in the patch that’s a couple of days ahead we can see larger, white blobs at the centre of each egg. Exciting times!
I have now numbered my egg patches and will continue to do so, so hopefully I will get an idea of how long the eggs take to hatch. If my snails are Acute Bladder snails, their eggs may hatch within two weeks, so hopefully I will have a baby snail update soon. Another photo of mating:
Spiral snail:
Some of the tadpoles are getting properly-developed legs now. When I got the tadpoles some had teeny tiny leggies, seemingly only 1 millimeter thick and 2-3 mm long. Now, the legs of some are big enough that we can see the joints. One tadpole was swimming around with the legs just floppy and relaxed and dangling, sadly I didn’t catch that on photo.
