Snail Facts and Information. Habitat, Feeding, Anatomy, Reproduction, Lifecycle, Predators.

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Introduction

Snails’ ancestors are one of the earliest known types of animals in the world. There is fossil evidence of primitive gastropods dating back to the late Cambrian period; this means that they lived nearly 500 million years ago.

There are many types of snails, but they fundamentally differ because they are aquatic or terrestrial. The former are adapted to live in the sea or bodies of fresh water, but the latter live exclusively on land, although in humid areas.

All land snails are gastropod mollusks, meaning that they belong to the same group of octopuses, which are part of the phylum Mollusca. At the same time, they are members of the class Gastropoda, which includes all snails and slugs. Being a mollusk means lacking an internal skeleton and bones, but snails are not unprotected.

Gastropods can adapt to a variety of living conditions, and they don’t require large amounts of food. They have been able to continually evolve to survive the conditions around them which many researchers find to be very fascinating.

Gastropods belong to the phylum Mollusca (or Mollusks) a classification of invertebrate animals with a soft unsegmented body, sometimes covered with an exoskeleton or shell. This phylum, Mollusca, includes animals like squids, octopuses, clams and cuttlefishes among others. Snails and slugs are both Gastropods. Therefore they are closely related, regardless the fact that slugs lack a protective shell.

Being a Gastropod

The most striking physical feature of snails is their spiral shell that they load on the back. It is a hard structure composed of calcium carbonate, which protects their soft body and internal organs. Among these organs is their lung because land snails breathe air from the atmosphere that then passes into a lung to get the oxygen; this is one of the main differences with aquatic snails, that only a few species of water snails breathe air.

You will find snails everywhere around the world. In fact, Gastropods range second, only behind insects when it comes to the number of named species. As an obvious result of this, they are found in many locations, living in a very diverse type of habitats and even having particular feeding habits.

The Earth offers a vast diversity of habitats for snails. Surely you have found tiny snails under a stone, but also climbing some stem or leaf of a plant. They can survive in natural environments or places frequented by humans, such as public parks and gardens.

Their quantity and diversity are vast. There are anything between 85,000 and 150,000 mollusks of which 80-85 percent are gastropods. Therefore, the world is home to more than 60,000 species of them.

Land snails range greatly in size. While some of them are only a few inches long and often weigh only a few ounces, there are land snails that reach almost 12 inches, like the Giant African Land Snail, a species endemic to Africa.

Although snails do not have legs, they can move thanks to a “muscular foot” that, based on wave movements, allows the snail to go from one place to another. This action is smoother and safer for snails with the help of the “mucus” that the snail secretes to slide on all types of surfaces and maintain its moisture reduces friction and avoids harms to their body.