Two Types Of Snails You Won't Believe Actually Exist
- Admin
- Apr 21, 2017
- 2 min read
Mother Nature never fails to surprise us with her creativity. There are two types of snails you won't believe actually exist!
Hairy snails
Though hairy snails are not that rare, most people never see one in their whole life mainly because they are so small. Most hairy snails are only a few millimeter long.
It is still unclear why hairy snails have hair but a current assumption is that the hairy shell enables the snail to better hold on to wet plant leaves. The hairy shell sticks to the wet surface. A paper published in 2005 states "haired shells appeared to be the ancestral character state, a feature most probably lost three times independently. These losses were correlated with a shift from humid to dry habitats, indicating an adaptive function of hairs in moist environments. It had been previously hypothesised that these costly protein structures of the outer shell layer facilitate the locomotion in moist habitats. Our experiments, on the contrary, showed an increased adherence of haired shells to wet surfaces."
Read a little story written by Dr Mike Dodd about how he and his friends found a small hairy snail by accident.
Door Snails
Like hairy snails, door snails are tiny. They are normally no larger than 20mm. Door snails usually live on tree trunks, walls and rocks, where they can be seen crawling around in humid weather. Their outer appearance differs widely from what is expected of for snails, as door snail shells are not coiled to form a round spiral, but are into a tower-like spire.
And besides, almost all the species of snails in the family of door snails are left-handed, which is an uncommon feature in gastropod shells in general. ("Right-handed" snails refer to most snails that have clockwise spiralling shells. "Left-handed" snails refer to snails that have anti-clockwise spiralling shells.) Some research discovers left-handed snails are less likely to fall prey to snakes than their right-handed peers.
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