Never prejudge anyone, not even a snail - Research found no correlation between snails' memory p

Although it is difficult to know how smart a snail is, "Habitat stability, predation risk and ‘memory syndromes’" by S. Dalesman, A. Rendle, and S.R.X. Dall shed lights on the irrelevance between snails' habitat type and their memory forming.

There are 3 groups of tested snails in the experiment. One group is from laboratory. These snails have been used for over 25 years to study learning and memory. They make a good control group and are seen as living in an environment where food is stable and no predators are around. The second group of test snails are from rivers, where is considered to have stable food but many predators around (such as snail-eating fish). The third group of snails are from ditches, where is considered to have unstable food but many predators (such as snail-eating worms).

It is just intuitive to assume snails from rivers and ditches would form memories about predator threat quicker and better because they get used to that hash environment, isn't it? Likewise, I expected snails from labs would not form memories as well due to a reduced need to respond to predator threats in their environment.

However, snails never failed to surprise me! The research actually found there wasn't any correlation between snails' performance and the type of habitat they came from. Like human beings, snails that are good at somethings are normally very bad at other things. In this research, snails that were good at forming food memories, however, they were very bad at remembering about predator threat regardless of the type of habitat they came from.

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