B. Snails (HELICIDAE)

This is a diverse family of air-breathing land snails, which includes some popular edible snails.

Snail 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 or 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. British land snails either lay eggs or are ovoviviparous, where eggs hatch inside the mother. Breeding is normally done in Spring, Summer or Autumn, with this and other activities low in the Winter. Snail hunting is a test of imagination and patience, for they can take refuge virtually anywhere, from below ground level to the tops of trees. Snails are tenacious survivors, and no extinctions of British species in recent times have ever been recorded.