I'm Stijn Ghesquiere. I started with Applesnail.net in 1997 after I bought some beautiful yellow snails in a local pet shop. That got me started at the time.

How to contact me:

How to reach me: Send a mail to: stijn_applesnail*

* replace the underscore with an add and add dot net at the end

The start of Applesnail.net:
My fascination for apple snails started somewhere in the fall of 1997. At that time I bought 2 apple snails in the local aquarium shop. The reason I bought two animals was that I wanted to breed them and I expected them to be hermaphroditic just like the snails I knew at that time.
But that certainty vanished quickly: the scarce information I could find pointed out that the snails from the order mesogastropoda (where the apple snail belongs to) weren't all hermaphroditic. So I went back to the shop and bought 3 more snails to increase the chance of having both a male and a female snail in my small population.
I still didn't know much about these snails, in fact the info I could find at that time was very confusing (different family names, unclear genera names not even to mention the different species). The books available in aquarium shops didn't satisfy my needs for information at all nor did the information on internet. There wasn't a Reddit at the time.
This lack of useful information finally pushed me towards the scientific library and after several inter-library requests (most books and articles were on paper at the time) I got several articles and books on apple snails. The journey could start!
In March 1998 I made the first version of the apple snail website. It was far from complete and there many errors in it. In August 1998, the apple snail website went through a major update, reaching acceptable information level.
After that date, the updates were more or less 'minor' updates (more species added, better descriptions, enlarging the FAQ section etc.).
Leter on, I expanded the initial goal of covering only the genus Pomacea to covering the whole apple snail family (Ampullariidae). More and more species were added in the years after.
All those people who send me pictures, useful information and even live apple snails kept the project going. Thanks go out to all those people!
The gradually increasing numbers of visitors and the numerous nice comments I have received encourage me to keep this website up-to-date.
February 2001: Due to the success of my website I have decided to invest some money in a real URL: http://www.applesnail.net!
February 2021: The site is still up and running (23 years already!). Times have changed, and the internet is much richer in term of information and options to exchange information.
For example, the applesnail.net forum has become gradually less active and people have found other communication lines. That's fine, our forum here has had it's uses and still contains a wealth of information.
Applesnail.net is certainly in need for an update, certainly in terms of lay-out and technology. I do remember having to keep all photo's and illustration small and compact. Screens were low resolution and internet was way slower than it's today. Server space was more expensive and so on.
Also digital camera's were extremely expensive and pretty terrible in terms of image quality. So most pictures on applesnail.net were made with an analogue camera, developed and scanned prior to inclusion in the website.
CMS platforms like Wordpress and Joomla weren't even there when I started with this site. Luckily I had Dreamweaver (from Macromedia at the time), which helped me to manage this project (+260 webpages).
All in all, it shows that this website was made decades ago.

My snails:
I used to have many species of apple snails (Asolene spixi, Asolene megastoma, Asolene sp., Pomacea diffusa (bridgesii), Pomacea canaliculata, Pomacea flagellata, Pomacea haustrum and Marisa cornuarietis). Unfortunately, at the moment, only Pomacea diffusa snails inhabit my tanks.
Read my 'Experiences with apple snails' page for more info.
Update 2021: I don't have any apple snail at the moment, but many other pets. I do intend to get some apple snails again.

Errors?
English isn't my native tongue, so it might be that there are errors on these pages. Please let me know if you have found one. Note that I use the UK English (my dictionary is an UK one). If you don't agree with some parts of the contents or if you have experiences with apple snails that you would like to share with others, let me know. I'm also very interested in pictures of apple snails, especially of those species that aren't covered yet on this site. If you see anomalies in the website, I will be grateful if you inform me of them.

Copyrights:
Except where otherwise noted, all pages on applesnail.net are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. In practise this means that you can only use material non commercially, and only when you give credits to Stijn Ghesquiere and you need to mention this licence, and if you build on top of material from applesnail.net, you need to use the same license.

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Awards:
Yep, I did receive some awards for this website! You can take a look at them: [click here].

Other Personal interests:
- Photography
- Graphic design
- Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life
- Cockroaches (as pets)
- Reading

Last updated: Februari, 2021

Except where otherwise noted, this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License . http://www.applesnail.net