Garden Snail

The Garden Snail is an edible snail, is one of our most familiar species of snails.

Species introduction

At a glance
Latin name: 
Cornu aspersa
Family: 
Snails
Family Latin name: 
HELICIDAE
Category: 
Invertebrates

Species description

Species description

This edible snail is one of our most familiar species, with its yellow or cream-coloured shell with brown spiral stripes, although like all snails the pattern and colour are variable.  The garden snail has a flat, muscular foot that helps it move with a gliding motion aided by the release of mucus to reduce the friction with the surface.  This mucus is the reason for the trail that these snails leave when they move around.

Molluscs

Molluscs are a large, diverse group of invertebrates, which have soft, unsegmented bodies enclosed within calcareous shells, and are represented in gardens mainly by terrestrial gastropods such as snails and slugs.  Other molluscs, particularly the bivalves (like clams, oysters, scallops, cockles) and cephalopods (like squid and octopus), are aquatic.  Their shells are secreted by a soft mantle covering the body.

Species photographs

Larger photograph(s) (click to magnify)
The Garden Snail is an edible snail, is one of our most familiar species of snails.

Details

Species family information

Snails are shelled gastropod molluscs. There are terrestrial, marine, and freshwater species, and they produce shells that the soft body can retract into. They have no internal skeleton, and they propel themselves with a muscular 'foot'. They are mostly herbivores, using their rasping tongues to eat into living or dead plant stems, leaves, flowers, fruit and fungi. This tearing and scraping activity is distinctly audible. A few are omnivorous or carnivorous, but all eat some soil or sand to get the calcium needed to create the shell. They are crepuscular and nocturnal and use their powerful sense of smell to seek food, keeping as cool and moist as they can. In drought conditions they will go into a suspended, restful state of aestivation, the Summer equivalent of hibernation. Some snails leave silvery slime trails. The Helicicae family of snails is a diverse family of air-breathing land snails, which includes some popular edible snails.

Category information

Centipedes, millipedes, and their kin are collectively called myriapods. Centipedes are carnivores, and have one pair of jointed legs per body segment, which never have 100 segments, but vary from 30 to 354. Millipedes have two pairs of jointed legs per body segment, up to 333 in number, and mostly feed on decaying plant material. Myriapods are arthropods and share a common ancestor with the crustacea, that includes insects, which in turn share a common ancestor with the arachnids. Arthropods have an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and paired, jointed appendages. They have highly developed sense organs. 84% of all species on the Earth are arthropods. Crustacea generally have two pairs of appendages (antennules and antennae) in front of the mouth and paired appendages near the mouth that function as jaws. They occupy a wide range of habitats, and many are aquatic, although the largest group in terms of number of species, the insects, are mainly terrestrial. Woodlice are common crustaceans in gardens.

Earthworms are annelids, evolving on a separate lineage to the arthropods, but they share a common ancestor with the molluscs. The Annelida is a large group of segmented worms, also called ring worms. Molluscs are a large, diverse group of invertebrates, which have unsegmented bodies enclosed within calcareous shells, and are represented in gardens mainly by terrestrial gastropods such as snails and slugs. Other molluscs, particularly the bivalves and cephalopods, are aquatic. Representatives of all these groups are found in the cemetery.