In late February, Linda Davis and I joined colleagues from the East London Museum for an excursion to the Transkei region of the E. Cape. The area of interest included the forests on the escarpment inland of Mthatha (previously Umtata).

Although heavily impacted by commercial forestry, we managed to find some exciting molluscs, including an undescribed tail-wagger snail (genus Sheldonia) belonging to a completely new clade within this complex genus.

Coincidentally, Prof. Michelle Hamer has recently also found another representative of this clade in the Prentjiesberg near Maclear, during an EarthWatch expedition to the forests of the Maluti-Drakensberg World Heritage Site.

On the Transkei trip we also visited the stunningly beautiful Collywobbles section of the Bashee River valley (famous for its large Cape vulture colony) where, believe it or not, we found yet another undescribed tail-wagger, belonging to another new clade. This is all wonderful new data for our study of the phylogenetics of this complex genus.

In mid March, I participated as co-principal investigator in another EarthWatch expedition to the Drakensberg forests, focusing on the Monk?s Cowl area and Royal Natal National Park.

Although weather conditions were pretty grim, the haul of snails was good and included some unusual species of cannibal snail, much needed for Adnan Moussalli?s current research project .

Besides being a research exercise this expedition was a capacity building exercise involving a group of Zululand community bird guides sponsored by Rio Tinto (which owns Richard's Bay Minerals). The aim to expose the guides to the world of invertebrate diversity and to empower them to enrich their own field excursions by passing on the knowledge they gained with us to their clients.

With winter now approaching activity will largely focus on lab work, investigating the material collected during the summer, unravelling the complexities of snail morphology and linking this with data from DNA sequences.