A Microscopic Look at Snail Jaws | Hacker News Reader

A Microscopic Look at Snail Jaws

nhm.org

74 pointsdmbche8 comments

When I was a kid, I watched a slug eat a dandelion leaf. I could hear the snap as it took each bite. I hadn't really thought of them as having mouths before. I must have imagined they somehow absorbed their food through all of the slime. It was also a revelation as I'd seen so many of those leaves with holes in them and suddenly I knew how they came to be that way.

Yeah, on a quiet day here I can hear the snails chewing on leaves.

There are slugs which use their slime as a predigestion stage, like leopard slugs, who are carnivorous. Their slime is an effective meat tenderiser.

The really interesting stuff is in the Toxoglosa group that includes carnivore sea snails.

https://www.micronaut.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/%C2%A9-M...

https://www.micronaut.ch/project/leathal-weapons/

Many years ago I went camping and snails entered the tent. They proceeded to eat the pages out of a book, rasping the top layer of paper off of pages while leaving the lower layers of the pages intact. It was one of those "The Reality of Dan Brown's Fiction"-style books which were all the rage back then, proving to me that snails will literally eat anything, no matter how little sustaining.

This is really neat. I love snails and have been trying to find them in my city but I’ve been having a hard time finding them. I used to see them a lot in the south after it would rain, but it rains all the time here in the PNW and I cannot find any snails.

I've been seeing a number of brown lipped snails and pacific sidebands around the Seattle area recently. But there are some smaller ones as well. Most of the common ones are introduced, but pacific sidebands are a native species with a shell that gets a bit bigger than an inch across.

If you go to the beaches at low tide right now you'll likely see moon snail eggs.

Here's a PDF guide to Snails and slugs in Oregon: https://www.oregon.gov/oda/shared/documents/publications/ipp...

The Burke museum has an iNaturalist project for snails and slugs, you could use it to see where to look. Or even contribute! https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/slime-pacific-northwest

I just went for a walk in the redwoods here in Northern California, and was amazed at how many redwoods snails there were.

I remember having an aquarium as a kid, and it had a few snails in it. You could see them on the glass sometimes 'licking' the algae off of it.

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