We have found empty conical shells more than once, amazingly green in color, with slight variations in the tone of the main color and the "rims" separating the segments of the spiral. With empty shells, you always wonder: I wonder what kind of mollusk wore this, and what did it look like? And then, luck struck: not far from home, on the bank of a stream, we encountered a live snail with a yellow-green shell featuring blue bands and a thin purple outline. By that time, I already knew (thanks to my friends, the malacologists — specifically, conchologists, who collect and study snail shells in Vietnam) that this green snail was a rather valuable specimen of some species of the genus Amphidromus, which are difficult to find alive. More often, scientists come across empty, already damaged shells. Of course, I took many photos and videos of this mollusk — a pearly pale creature carrying a beautiful shell.

Amphidromus snails are generally quite colorful and large land snails that prefer humid forests near rivers and streams, or more precisely, they are tree snails. Scientists' interest in them is not surprising. In addition to the fact that they are still poorly studied, the genus Amphidromus is unusual because it includes species with both right-handed and left-handed shell twists. The term "amphidromine," which gave the genus its name, means that within one species population, there are both "left-handed" and "right-handed" individuals. This is an extremely rare phenomenon and is very interesting to biologists, but so far, all the specimens we have encountered — whether empty shells or live snails — show a predominance of one direction of shell twist.