Achatina fulica on the island of Timor, Lesser Sunda Islands (Indonesia)

Since the two exhaustive treatises by Mead (1961, 1979) on the giant African snail, Achatina fulica Bowdich, 1822, the distribution of this gastropod pest species outside Africa is well-known. However, apart from its dispersal on the major islands of Southeast Asia and in the western Pacific, little is known of its occurrence on minor islands. In Indonesia A. fulica is known from Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, New Guinea, Java, Bali and a host of smaller islands, mainly in the western, central and northeastern parts of the archipelago. Apparently so far no records from the Lesser Sunda Islands E. of Bali are available. Van Benthem Jutting (1952: 392) reports it from ‘... several Lesser Sunda Is.’, but the species has not been mentioned in e.g., an enumeration of the land molluscs of Sumba (Van Benthem Jutting, 1958). A Roman Catholic missionary, Father J. A. J. Verheyen, has assiduously collected zoological material for the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (Leiden) on the island of Flores and recently also on Timor, the easternmost in the chain of the Lesser Sunda Islands. Mixed with other shell material recently received at the museum, there is a fresh, obviously live-collected, juvenile shell (length 29 mm) of A. fulica from 5 km E. of Webriamata, S. Timor, 50 m.s.m., 5.VII.1980. This is probably the first record of the species for Timor, where it has possibly established itself already.