Sinployea cresswelli
Sinployea cresswelli was named in 2025 by Frank Climo, Karin Mahlfeld and David Roscoe, in their revision of the genus Sinployea. It belongs to the Charopidae: mostly tiny, finely ribbed snails of forest litter, and the largest family of New Zealand land snails.
| Family | Charopidae |
| Authority | Climo, Mahlfeld & Roscoe, 2025 |
| Threat status | Proposed in 2025, see Conservation below |
| Shell | Shell small, depressed subglobose, thin, and fragile, 1.9 mm wide and 1.09 mm high at 3.6 whorls, coarsely ribbed and moderately tightly coiled for the group.Spire broadly domed, 263 μm high, apex emergent. |
Distribution
Sinployea cresswelli was first collected in the 1970s at Arthur’s Pass, Southern Alps, and it is also known from Lewis Pass, Canterbury, the northeastern range limit of the species, Westland, Rapahoe, and Fox Range and Anchor Island in Dusky Sound, SW Fiordland. Sinployea cresswelli, S. charopiformis, and S. canaliculata form a group of more tightly coiled species with a wider umbilicus that are allopatric and meet in mid-western Fiordland.
Habitat
Temperate beech (Nothofagus) forest.
The name
Named after our friend and shell collector, Peter Cresswell of Motueka, who collected the type material.
Conservation
In total,>300 collection events are recorded in the Te Papa holdings of land snails from the Paparoa Range area (J31, K29, K30, K31, K32, L29, and L 30 in Fig. 2), but S. cresswelli was collected only once in>100 years of collecting. Twenty-five collection events are reported from the Lewis Pass area (map sheet L 31 in Fig. 2) and>80 from Arthur’s Pass (map sheet K33). On current distribution records, this snail appears to be sparse. We recommend ranking S. cresswelli as ‘At Risk: Naturally Uncommon’, with the qualifiers ‘Data Poor: Size and Trend’ and ‘Biologically Sparse’. The 2010 NZTCS assessment ranked S. cresswelli as ‘Insufficient information: Data Deficient’, with the qualifier ‘Biologically Sparse’.
Sources
- Described in: Mahlfeld, K., Climo, F. & Roscoe, D. (2025). Systematics, conservation status, and biogeography of 16 new species of Sinployea Solem, 1983 (Gastropoda: Charopidae) from New Zealand. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 204(1). Publication details
- Treatment on Plazi (CC0). Distribution, habitat, name and conservation text are quoted from it.
This record was compiled from published, public data. A full factsheet for this species has not been written yet.