Status Updates From The Sound of a Wild Snail E...

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.

Slugs, despite what one might think, given their naked look, do not predate snails on the evolutionary tre but were once snails that evolved over time to be shell-less. Without a shell to tote around, they can change their shape more easily than a snail, thus squeezing into smaller crevices.

Bishop's poem "Giant Snail" that is so enchanted, with its own shell that it made me want my own:
Ah, but I know my shell is beautiful, and high, and glazed, and shining. I know it well, although have not seen it. Its curled white lip is of the fines enamel. Inside, it is as smooth as silk, and I, I fil to perfection.

This book isn’t like any other book I’ve read

While we humans have five senses, relying most heavily on vision to find our way, a snail relies almost entirely on just three senses: smell, taste, and touch, with smell being the most critical. My snail could not hear anything at all; it lived in a world of silence. Its "sight" was highly limited — just a general awareness of dark and light to help with orientation.

Aristotle noted that snail teeth are "sharp, and small, and delicate." My snail possessed around 2,640 teeth, so I'd add the word plentiful to Aristotle's description. The teeth point inward so as to give the snail a firm grasp on its food; with about 33 teeth per row and maybe eighty or so rows, they form a multitoothed ribbon called a radula

The scientific name for a snail or slug— a mollusk with a single muscular foot— is gastropod; derived from Latin and Greek, the word means "stomach-foot."

“I liked the sound of the word "snail" every time I said it; the word was as small and simple as the creature itself. It is a word from Old English, with an earlier derivation from the German schnecke, for snail, spiral, or spiral shaped”

snails are hermaphrodite