ABSTRACT
Introduction Although not included within the aquatic regimes and macrohabitats, and technically outside the scope of this book, the tropical hardwood hammocks of the Florida Keys archipelago offer a unique biotope that houses an interesting and highly endemic fauna of tree snails. No book on the malacofaunas of the Florida Keys would be complete without, at least, a short overview of these spectacular endemic gastropods. The same biotic principles of geographical isolation that have produced the endemic marine malacofauna have also worked in the insular terrestrial environment, allowing for the evolution of extremely rich tree snail faunas on many of the widely separated island groups. On most of the larger keys, from Elliott Key south to Key West, dense tropical hardwood forests had become established after the last major Pleistocene sea-level rise (during the Sangamonian Stage; see Petuch and Roberts, 2007; Petuch and Sargent, 2011c). These floras were derived primarily from Caribbean and West Indian taxa, with the incipient forests having been brought to the newly formed islands by seeds in bird droppings or from seeds and propagules that washed ashore during hurricanes. The primary source for these tropical hardwood tree forests was the continental-type island of Cuba, only 120 km to the south. The newly formed late Pleistocene Keys archipelago thus became the gateway into North America for tropical migrants, both plant and animal, from the West Indies and Caribbean Basin.
