Snails Are Amazing

When writing to engage people with their local nature, butterflies, swallows and dormice are easy, but trying to convince people to love snails is more difficult. The point is they are remarkable creatures and our local environment is enriched by their presence.

Many gardeners object to all snails because some feed on some plants, but there are over 100 different land snail species and most of them feed on dead plant material, they actually help the gardener to recycle nutrients. Also, they are an important food for many creatures and their disappearance would have negative knock on effects. One reason that thrushes and hedgehogs have become much rarer in towns is that modern molluscicides (slug pellets to you and me) are so effective and garden snails are harder to find.

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Even people eat lots of different molluscs including snails and it is said that they were the first animals to be actively farmed for food. The Romans liked them and brought their favourite large species with them. In some parts of Europe snail eggs are collected and eaten as caviar.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about snails is their slime which is a form of mucin. We have different mucins that keep us alive, it coats the inside of our lungs to allow the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. It allows us to swallow and digest our food. Not for me but some people use the hydrating effect of snail mucin as a skin cream. Doctors have developed a modified form that can be used for the tricky job of sealing wounds in heart surgery.

Mucin is a Newtonian liquid, treat it gently and it slides and slips, jerk it sharply and it stiffens. This property enables snail slime to lubricate a snail’s journey but helps the snail to hang on if you try to pick it up. If you do want to pick up a snail without hurting it, tap the shell gently to make the foot retract first.

There is now a developing range of medical adhesives based on mucin. They can be mixed with water and pasted onto special strips laid across a wound, even on the wall of a heart inside your chest. The strip and mucin respond to the stress as the heart beats and hold on like the snail when you try to lift it.

Snail shells are beautiful but also miracles of engineering. Line after line of calcium carbonate is laid down around the rim of the aperture growing wider and wider as the snail grows. This is bound together with an outer coating of another protein called conchin. Other minerals are bound in and this creates the distinctive patterns of the different species. Some of our banded snails have very attractive shells, but even the common garden snail has an intricate pattern if you take a close look.

You might also come across a Kentish Snail which has a hairy shell when it is young, although the hairs wear off as it makes its way through rough grass. It is believed these snails also arrived with the Romans and they have now spread across southern England.

Snails are generally nocturnal, they avoid the light because of the danger of drying out. They have light sensitive cells in their skin and very simple eyes but with no lens and so they cannot actually see. Their cousins octopuses and squids have complex eyes as effective as most vertebrate eyes.

Can I convince you to take a closer look?

Ed Dolphin