The electric snail is here. There’s an electric cockroach too.

Both are early experimental forays in a new line of research aimed at creating tiny, self-powered animal/machine hybrids as an alternative to tiny robots.

Instead of starting from scratch and having to solve all those pesky movement problems that plague roboticists, some researchers have asked, why not start out with living creatures that already know how to walk and fly?

Then all we have to do is make them robotlike, outfitting them with the right technology so that we can enslave them and make them do our bidding — in search-and-rescue work, spying or attacking enemies with bug phobias.

The snail is not an obvious military choice, except perhaps in a biowarfare attack on some nation’s lettuce sector, but this whole area of research is just beginning, and snails are easy to catch and keep track of in the lab.