Rodatzi Giant African Land Snails (Lissachatina Fulica)

Take the standard giant African land snail, remove the dark banding from the shell, and what is left is a clean golden yellow. That is Rodatzi. Same species as the ordinary one, same size, same care sheet, one visible difference, and it is a difference that carries right through the animal's life rather than fading with age the way the wild-type banding does.

Where the name comes from

Rodatzi is not a shop invention, which is unusual for a colour form. It was described by Dunker in 1852 and sits in the databases as Lissachatina fulica rodatzi, a named subspecies of the species formerly called Achatina fulica. Not every authority accepts it at that rank, and some lists leave it out entirely, so treat it as a formally named form rather than a settled taxonomic fact. Either way it is a good deal more grounded than most trade labels.

The body underneath the shell stays the normal dark grey. This matters, because the trade separates three things and the names run together. Plain Rodatzi is a golden shell on a dark-bodied snail. What sellers call an albino Rodatzi is the same golden shell on a white, unpigmented body, and the shell itself is not albino at all. A full albino is white in both. We keep the white-bodied form as a separate listing for exactly that reason. If you are buying elsewhere, ask which of the three you are getting, because they are not valued the same and they are not the same animal.

Care, which is the easy part

Everything here is the same as the wild-type. A large adult shell falls somewhere between 5 and 12cm with roughly 20cm the ceiling for the species, they carry seven to nine whorls, and most live three to six years, with roughly ten as the outer limit.

They want warmth and damp. Active from around 9°C up to 29°C, they are at their best in the low twenties, so a heat mat fixed to one side of the tank earns its place in a British home for most of the year. Push past 30°C and the snail seals its shell and shuts down until conditions improve. Give a substrate deep enough to bury in completely, coir or loam, kept damp without being sodden.

Calcium is not optional and it is not a supplement. The shell grows all its life, so cuttlebone lives in the tank permanently and gets replaced when it goes. Food is leafy greens, cucumber, courgette, peppers, carrot and most fruit, varied and cleared out before it spoils. Nothing salted, ever.

Before you buy

Two things to have straight. First, they are hermaphrodites and they lay in quantity, so decide now what you will do with eggs. Under section 14 of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act it is an offence to release a non-native animal, or to let one escape, which means unwanted clutches get frozen rather than put outside, and the lid gets closed every time.

Second, this is a species you cannot take everywhere. The United States bans the entire group federally as a plant pest and destroys any it finds, and Australia prohibits them. In Britain they are perfectly legal and need no licence.

Ours are UK captive-bred. The Pink Lipped is the other one we keep and it is a separate species, told apart by the pink column inside the shell mouth where this one is white. Everything else sits in our other invertebrates.

Each snail leaves here bedded in moist moss, inside a vented tub, cushioned within an outer carton of doubled card. We post Mondays through Thursdays and no later, so nothing of ours meets the weekend backlog. The service is next-day and tracked, delivered ahead of 1pm, and we stand behind live arrival.