On Monday the 25th of March, the Malacology division of the KwaZulu-Natal Museum kicked off on the second leg of the project to sample the inselbergs just north of the border between the Free State and Kwazulu-Natal. These inselbergs are treasure troves on which one can find an interesting set of species that have lived in isolation without connections to other forested areas. The majority of terrestrial molluscs cannot survive in dry grasslands and agriculture fields and thus these molluscan populations are separated, often by great distances. Miraculously many snails survived in isolation in tiny forest patches, some times under a single tree, for a very long time. We have so far found a number of interesting species and are hoping to find many more.

(an inselberg is a large, isolated rock hill or mountain that rises abruptly from a plain)