Status Updates From El sonido de un caracol sal...

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, 1903, from Letters to a Young Poet, 1927

Late one winter night I wrote in my journal:

A last look at the stars and then to sleep. Lots to do at whatever pace I can go. I must remember the snarl.
Always remember the snail.

in this falling rain
where are you off to
snail?
— KoBAYASHI ISSA (1763-1828)

The original snail and I had been fellow captives, but now we had both returned to our natural habitats.

"The young one[s] emerge in a lovely bub-ble-like shell," wrote the author of "Snails and Their Houses." Their shells are translucent and "so delicate", William Kirby notes, "that a sun-stroke destroys them."

Eggs are usually laid below ground in several clutches of thirty to fifty each.

"But snails don't sit on their eggs," he explained.
"They bury them in damp earth and leave them."
"The ideal way of bringing up a family," said
Mother, unexpectedly but with immense conviction.
"I wish I'd been able to bury you all in some damp earth and leave you."

A romantic encounter between a pair of snails can take up to seven hours from start to finish and involves three phases. First there is the lengthy courtship… exchanging tentacle touches… the second phase, the snails embrace in a spiral direction and mate… the last phase, resting, the snails… withdraw into their shells… fertilization occurs internally, after the lovers have parted.

A snail may find a partner randomly or show a preference for age or size. They mate in late spring, cary summer, or fall, after an elaborate and complex courtship.
A terrestrial snail that has been isolated for a while can, rather conveniently, self-fertilize, thus founding a new colony and ensuring the survival of its genes.

It was amazing how the snail, with virtually no sight, found such perfect hiding spots.

For a gastropod, survival of the fittest often means survival of the slimiest.

hit by a raindrop
he shuts himself in …
snail
—YoSA BUSON (1716-1783)

I envied my snail's many abili-ties. I wished I could create an epiphragm at a moment's notice and seal myself off from the challenges around me.

THREE AND A HALF billion years ago, when life on earth began, the snail and I shared a common ancestor, some kind of simple worm that over time evolved into two animal groups.

little snail facing this way where to now?
—KoBAYASHI ISSA (1763-1828)

Some terrestrial snails even "gallop" by picking up the front of their foot and leaping forward, leaving behind a dotted slime trail. This may save on slime use or possibly outwit a preda-tor. If frightened, one snail species will lift itself up on its posterior and speed-glide eighteen inches per minute.

Snails will often reuse their own or another snail's trail in order to save on slime production. By detecting pheromones in a trail, they can determine whether it leads to foe, friend, or potential mate.

a special kind of slime for locomo-tion, called pedal mucus, over which it traveled. While its ability to glide over a patch of moss appeared effort-less… I could see bands of minute ripples moving across the underside of its foot. These ripples momentarily turned the mucus from solid to liquid, disrupting friction and allowing the snail to advance at a speed of a few inches per minute.

rather than making a single batch of "all-purpose" slime, my snail had a species-specific recipe for each of these needs and for different parts of its body. It could adjust the ingredients, just as a good cook would, to meet a particular occasion. And in a catastrophic accident in which a snail is squashed, it can release a flood of lifesaving, medicinal mucus packed with antioxidants and regenerative properties.

Slime is the sticky essence of a gastropod's soul, the medium for everything in its life: locomotion, defense, healing, courting, mating, and egg protection. Nearly one-third of my snail's daily energy went into slime pro-duction.