The author, Stijn A. I. Ghesquiere, has a PhD in molecular genetics, and currently works as clinical cytogeneticist. In his free time, he spends (way too much) time on the freshwater snails from the family Ampullariidae (apple snails).

The start of Applesnail.net:
My fascination for apple snails started somewere 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. This lack of useful information finally pushed me towards the scientific library and after several inter-library requests I got several articles and books on the apple snail subject and the reading could start.
In March 1998 I made the first version of the apple snail website. It was far from complete and there were still 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.).
Lately I've expanded the initial goal of covering only the genus Pomacea to covering the whole apple snail family (Ampullariidae) and currently I'm adding more and more species.
People who send me pictures, useful information and even live apple snails initiated many of the latest additions. Thanks go out to 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!

My snails:
I used to have many species of apple snails (Asolene spixi, Asolene megastoma, Asolene sp., Pomacea bridgesii, Pomacea canaliculata, Pomacea flagellata, Pomacea haustrum and Marisa cornuarietis). Unoftunately, at the moment, only Asolene spixi is crawling around in my tanks.
Read my 'Experiences with apple snails' page for more info.

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. Finally, it might (should not) occur that you see strange colours or other anomalies in the lay-out, in spite of the fact that these pages are tested with several browsers and on several platforms: Opera, Mozilla, Netscape on linux and windows and Internet explorer on windows (obvious). 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
- Neural networks and Robotics
- GNU Linux and Open source software in general.

E-mail:

Last updated: Februari 12th, 2007

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