Intra-shell stable isotopes in land snail as proxies of seasonal climate variability: Ontogenetic evidence from cultured and field specimens

Abstract

Land snail shells preserve stable oxygen and carbon isotope compositions ( d 18 O shell and d 13 C shell ) that offer valuable seasonal to weather-scale records of terrestrial environmental changes. However, the extent to which ontogenetic processes influence these signals remains insufficiently understood. Here, we investigated intra-shell isotopic variations in giant African land snails from laboratory cultured Achatina fulica and field collected Lissachatina fulica from Panzhihua, China. Laboratory experiments show that adult snail exhibits a d 18 O shell enrichment of up to 0.8 ‰, likely driven by internal physiological processes such as biomineralization and metabolism. In addition, d 13 C shell show an enrichment of 1.3 ‰ in subadult and adult shells, potentially associate with increased carbonate ingestion. In natural settings, intra-shell d 18 O shell variations primarily reflects seasonal fluctuation in precipitation d 18 O, with physiological effects exerting only a minor influence. Although d 13 C shell values in wild snails fall within the expected range of C 3 plant-based diets, the potential roles of carbonate ingestion and dietary selectivity should be considered when reconstructing vegetation isotope signatures. These findings establish land snail shells as robust proxies of sub-annual climate variability and offer a modern calibration framework to enhance the use of terrestrial biocarbonates in paleoclimate reconstructions, particularly across monsoonal and moisture-sensitive regions.

Keywords

Giant African land snail / Biogenic carbonate / d 18 O shell / d 13 C shell / Ontogenetic effect / Seasonal climate reconstruction

Data availability

All data related to stable isotope measurements can be accessed through the Loess Science Data Center (https://doi.org/10.12262/lsdc.Geochemistry.20250001).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xiulan Zong: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Data curation, Conceptualization. Jibao Dong: Writing - review & editing, Resources, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Hong Yan: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Yougui Song: Writing - review & editing, Resources. Huifang Liu: Writing - review & editing, Methodology. Shugang Kang: Writing - review & editing. Zheng Wang: Writing - review & editing. Hongxuan Lu: Writing - review & editing. Yunning Cao: Methodology. Guozhen Wang: Writing - review & editing. Chengcheng Liu: Writing - review & editing. Yana Jia: Writing - review & editing. Qian Zhang: Writing - review & editing. Haijiao Gan: Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We greatly acknowledge Yanmin Liu and Qianya Li for their assistance with wild snail sample preparation, and Yahuai He for his support in shell isotope analyses. This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42377445, 42402197), the 2nd Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (2019QZKK0101), the CAS Youth Interdisciplinary Team Program (2024000021), Shaanxi Provincial Distinguished Young Scientists Program (2025JC-JCQN009) and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2025.102164.

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