Stuff You Should KnowThey seem gross and bothersome at first, but once you get down to ground level and get to know snails, we’ll bet you’ll grow quite fond of them. They are living in a whole world we’re largely unaware of.
Hey, everybody out there in the Pacific Northwest or with access to an airport or a car rental place that can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the end of January. We'll see you in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.
That's right to. Our new live show for twenty twenty four is Seattle, Washington January twenty fourth at the Paramount Theater, then Portland at our Homeway from Home at Revolution Hall in the twenty fifth, and then winding it all up at Sketchfest on the twenty six at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.
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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the Slowcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. We're just inch and along doing things our own way, our own speed, our own time, leaving a trail of mucus behind us as we do.
Wow. Inch and a long point five inches per second.
Yeah, it's like that. One guy said life is a highway. I want to write it all night long, covering only an inch.
Was that the parenthetical of that title?
Yeah, it was. It was you had to read between the lines, Yeah, exactly what a great song?
Or play it backwards that song you think is great?
Yeah, I do, I do. If you take away all the bit it's actually a great song. It's very upbeat and enthusiastic and very this is a good song.
Who was that?
I don't remember. I think that might have been his only song. Although now I've said that, I'm sure he's a huge since in Canada or something, and now everybody's gonna be mad at us.
Yeah, that happens a lot.
We'll find out. But anyway, whoever you are out there, who made that song? For listening bretton cap off to you. That's right, Chuck, I picked this one.
He's Canadian.
By the way, I knew it, dude, I know that always happened. I don't know, I don't know what's.
His name, Tom Cochrane.
I wanted to say Tom, but I wanted to say Tom Brocall and I was like, I'm not even going to bring that up.
And you know what, he's in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
Oh my god.
Oh M, so so much for that.
Okay, at any rate, hats off Tom Cochrane, I think, is what I was trying to say. Right, So, we're doing an episode on snails, which I'm kind of psyched about. Our new good friend Allison helped us with this one, and believe this is our second one. She's doing great.
Yeah, was this a listener recommendation?
No, this was a Josh recommendation.
Okay, I didn't know if this was. You know, we did some stuff recently with kids in the classroom, like little virtual appearance appearances for our book stuff kids should know, uh huh. And I know we got a lot of ideas and just for some reason, I thought snails might have been one of those.
Not a single one of those kids came up with the idea of snails. It was really sad.
Kids these days. I don't even know what snails are.
Snails that was was my pick. And I'm not sure where it came from. I think I just pulled it out of my head. But I'm glad I did, because this is one of those things where, I mean, snails are everywhere. Everyone knows what a snail is, like, it's just a part of living on Earth. You know about snails. And yet what Alison turned up and I wasn't aware of when I selected this, there's actually a bit of a dearth of information academic information on snails specifically, and that a lot of what we think we know about them is actually just like old yarns that gardeners have come up with over the years. So I love topics like that, And actually, from researching this, I've come to actually really appreciate snails like I Actually I kind of think they're cute now, just from watching them in some videos.
Well, I looked up a picture of the and we'll talk about these in a little more detail later, but that giant African snail, and there was one picture of a woman holding one of these things. Yeah, and I swear it looked like a bunny rabbit with a turtle shell.
Weird. No, I've not seen that picture.
It looked like a bunny I mean it's a snail. Clearly, it didn't look that much like a bunny, right, I wasn't like, what in the world.
Maybe it was eating a bunny? Is that what it was?
I don't think so, But you were right, Allison was keen to point out that malacology, which is someone who studies mollusks, it's just I guess there's just not a ton of those people out there, so they're just tend to be more people studying, you know, fi er, cuter things than snails.
I guess, right exactly, And even if you do have a lot of malacologists, they're studying mollusks, and snails just make up part of one class of a larger phylum of mollusca. They're part of Gastropoda. And it's not just snails in Gastropoda. We're talking slugs, sea slugs, conks, whelks, limpets. Basically all snail like creatures are in the Gastropoda class. So they're gastropodes, yeah, or gastropods.
Okay, I didn't know how that was pronounced.
So it's gotta be gastropod, right.
I mean, I think it's gastropod. But would it be gastropoda No here' is it one of those weird things that just flips when you shorten it.
It's that second thing. Okay, great, so I said, Also, Chuck, just living on Earth, you're aware of snails, and there's a reason for that. They've been around for a really, really long time. They are everywhere. And even if you're walking around Antarctica and you look down on the ground, you might see a snail waving up to you wearing a parka.
Yeah. And even if you know snails, as we will find out, love moisture, Even if you're in the desert, even if you're in Arizona living there in Phoenix, you might see a snail. Yeah, because there's still random water here and there.
Yeah. Plus also some of them have evolved to like really hang on to their water better than other times, so they can survive in the desert. It's just nuts. They're everywhere. As a matter of fact, they think that they there's about one hundred and fifty thousand gastropod species in total. Remember that includes slugs and all that stuff. But they think snail species are between thirty thousand and thirty five thousand, and I mean, you know, we think of snails as typically like the little garden snail, maybe the s car ghost snail. I think that's the Roman snail, if I'm not mistaken, But there are all sorts of snails. You mentioned the giant African land snail. Those things get I saw that they get to be about the size of a human fists or bigger. That's a big snail. But on the other end, there's another type of snail that they recently discovered and I think Vietnam and Cambodia on the walls of caves, and they can fit inside like a grain of sand, they're that small. But if you look at them under a microscope, they are very clearly snails.
Yeah. I saw about five hundred native species to North America, and we're generally going to be talking about, you know, sort of your average land snail, but there are snails that live exclusively in the water under the sea. It would you know, there's just no way we could talk about all the snails, So we're going to mainly concentrate on the kind that leave that mucasi trail on the sidewalk.
Right, Like, we could probably get through thirty four thousand species today, but definitely not thirty five.
Thousand, that's right, So we're not getting dry.
Okay. So the other thing that's kind of like a bummer about snail species is that as long as we've been scientifically paying attention to snails, we've recorded more than four hundred extinctions of snail species. And there's an atlantic short documentary I think it's like twelve minutes long. I think it's called Goodbye Snails, and it's set in Hawaii where they're experiencing this crazy mass extinction of their native snail species that exists nowhere else in the world. And it's a really kind of a tense little documentary. But the people who are trying to rescue these snail species and prevent them from extinction are really doing some amazing work over there.
Yeah, there's about a thousand of them that are lands now alone that are endangered right now. So that's that's a lot of species to be in trouble. So that's that's no good because as we will see, they can there can be invasive snails, and they can do some harm to the garden, but they also do a lot of great things for your garden and for the world.
Yeah, leave the snails alone.
You read them, I have.
Like once or twice. I'm not crazy about them, No, they're not. I'm not an S cargo fan. I'm a fan of the s cargo joke though.
Right, which is look at that S cargo?
Is that what it was? What a snail painted an ass on the side of his car?
That's right, that's a great elementary school kid joke.
Yep, that's wonderful. I was.
Trying to remember if I've ever I feel like I might have tried it one time, many many many years ago, because I do remember seeing snails floating in a buttery solution on a plate.
M hm.
And I think that was a little tiny.
Tong yeah, that's involved.
Yeah, but I really had a very very faint memory. So if I did try it, I don't know under what circumstance it was, but it was a long time ago, and it's not something i'd really be into now.
They even have like a specialized plate for serving them, and it basically doubles as like a doubled egg serving plate too. It's like, you know, got a bunch of depressions in it that the snails sit in.
Right, I'd rather have a double legg You can also eat snail eggs. They call it white caviar. Oh yeah, yeah, it's a thing. There's a I think it's like one hundred and thirty bucks for about one point seventy five ounces.
Wow. Wow, well that's a lot of snail eggs now that I think about it.
Yeah, it seems like it. I mean, it looks like it comes a little ten like caviar. But although I do love caviar, now I don't think I would try snail caviar.
Okay, I'll accept that answer.
And I know I've talked about a new wish to caviare just the past couple of years. So was it something I ever had until semi recently?
But now you have it at dinner every night.
Just you've heard an avocado toast every morning. I just have caviar toast. Cut it all over the biggest piece of sour dough I can.
With gold flakes on top.
All right, Should we talk about the body of a snail?
Yeah? I feel like we kind of have to because there's a lot of misconceptions people have about snails, including me, as far as their body goes.
Yeah, I mean, we can talk about their shell for a little bit. They have that well, we'll talk about the shell kind of threw out. It's obviously a protective device. Snail can pull themselves back into that shell, and they can actually put a little I think it's called an epigram, and that is like a it's like a front door, basically a temporary front door that they can put on the whole of that shell. So if you ever pick up a snail shell and it's covered with something, that is a temporary front door that a snail uses to keep people like you from poking around into that snail shell.
Yeah, and I saw that some of them have denticles on their like sharp kind of tooth like projections, so that if a predator tries to come in there after them, they'll get all torn up. Oh.
On the epigram, yeah.
It's like those reverse tire damage things that like a car rental parking lot. It's like that.
From what I understand, that's pretty cool. And it also keeps some moist because what a snail does not want to do is dry out, because once again, a snail is basically a slug with a helmet on.
Right, So I'd like to talk a little bit about the misconceptions of how the snail body is arranged. If we can, let's do it. Inside that shell is the actual body of the snail. What we see as the head in the in the tail is actually the head, true. But what looks like the tail is actually like the heel of its foot. That's what it's moving around on. Is its foot, right, it sing exactly, And so above on top of that foot is the whole body and all that is encased in the shell. And what's weird is there's one opening that the what do you say covers the opening.
The I think it's called an epigram. Okay, I'm sorry, I've been saying epigram, epiphram, epi.
Okay, gotcha. So what the epifram covers is called the aperture. And on land snails there's one aperture. There's one way in, one way out. And because all of their body is tucked up in the shell, they still got to poop, they've still got to breathe, they still have to do all the stuff that requires the outside atmosphere. And so what they've done is they've figured out how to double their bodies around so that their head and their including their anus are basically right next to one another at the aperture at the opening of their show.
Yeah, kind of like on top of their head. And this is something called torsion, which means to twist. You know, if you've heard of something, you've heard of torsion before. Probably.
Yeah, Chubby Checker was going to call his dance the torsion, and he's like, this doesn't have the right ring. Let's do the torsion, right. A traveler from the future came back in time and told him, no, we should call this the twist. Rocked out the high school dance and that was history.
That's pretty good. Did you think of that one beforehand?
No? No, okay, no I didn't. I've just gotten that good this late in the year.
I love it.
So. Yeah.
That body basically doubles back one hundred and eighty degrees on top of itself. And there's a lot of debate. I mean, should we get into that, like the great torsion debate.
Yeah, we can at least touch on it. Sure, it's almost impenetrable if you're not a malacologist.
Yeah, I would say so. So as far as when torsion emerged, they're not exactly sure, because you can't tell from like a fossil whether or not a you know, you can find a fossil of a shell, but the torsion is happening within the shell, so you can't really tell if it's been torsioned. Is that even a verb?
I don't know torted, I was gonna say torted. I didn't look it up, though, so I think tort it's right, let's say torted.
Yeah, I think it's torted. So you can't really tell if it's been torted by looking at a fossil. And so there's just been a lot of debate, like obviously this happened for a reason, no one knows exactly what that was. And like you mentioned at the beginning, some of the sort of old farmer's tales. One of those is you might hear some gardening people say, oh, well, actually they're asymmetry inside that shell provides balance, and that's it's not true.
No, no, that's definitely not There's also one that back in the day when they were all marine animals, because land snails evolve from marine aquatic snails, that it was a way to keep their their hind quarters, their tails, all that stuff from being bitten by a predator.
Probably it does make.
Sense, it's probably not it what the two biggest competing hypothesis are the rotation hypothesis and the asymmetrical hypothesis. And the rotational hypothesis the one that's been around since like nineteen twenty nine, and it basically says that at some point in the past, the the snail, some snail mutant came along and twisted around during its development and it became naturally selected because it was advantageous because it allowed the snail to retract its head faster, whereas before it would have had to retract the tail and then the head. Now it can retract the head because it's all it had to retract.
Yeah, but that was just like a spontaneous thing, right.
That's that's what they think. But it's just such a bizarre thing to have happen, especially in a single mutation, because again, what we're talking about is during the larval development a snail's body, it count it moves counterclockwise to one hundred and eighty degrees, and so its circulatory and nervous system forms a Figure eight inside the shell. It's not all just packed in there straight. It's all over the place, and because of that weird torsion thing, the entire right side of its anatomy, including its organs, are just not there. It's all left side organ stuff. It all just got moved over toward the inside of the shell because the right side is pressed up against the shell itself, and it's all because of torsion. And they just cannot figure out why that would have happened in the past. And clearly it could have happened as a as a like a mutation, and that obviously did, but why would it have been naturally selected for for hundreds of millions of years, which strongly implies that it was like an advantageous mutation.
Yeah, I would think so, right.
Yeah, So that's kind of like this debate that's going on that that is, I mean, you really have to understand snail anatomy and evolutionary history to go much further in understanding that debate. That's pretty much what I could glean from the whole thing.
Yeah, And I would say hesitate even getting into that debate. If you've had a couple of drinks at the bar and you're feeling a little squarely and you want to dive into this hot conversation.
Yeah, I would stare clear, just take a.
Break and have another drink and just relax.
Yeah, or maybe it's time for you to go home.
Right, Yeah, get a car to take you home or walk or whatever.
Yeah. So that's snails tort and we're not sure exactly why, but what we do know the upshot of it is that their body is double back on itself and there there ain't and their head are essentially right next to each.
Other, yes, exactly. They also have a mouth and inside that mouth is something called a radula. It has teeth on it and it's like it's kind of like a tongue, and they have you know, if you look at a snail and they turn those two little tentacles to look back at you, that's because they have eyes mounted on either one or two pairs of tentacles, and they can look at you. They can't hear you, they don't have ears. From what I saw, snails are basically deaf. But they can see you.
They can see you, and depending on the species, there's different types of eyes. Some have very simple eyes where they can detect changes in light and dark or maybe maybe movement. But there's some kinds I think that have the ability to see you, to focus on you. And because they're on the ends of those stalks, they can retract the eye themselves in the stalk, and then the stalk into the head, and then the head into the shell. And then when they want to see if danger's gone, they can peak one of those stalks out from the shell. Look around. Isn't that cool?
That's pretty cool?
Yeah?
I love it. And there's also the mantle, and the mantle will come up quite a bit. And the best I could figure is that mantle is that area around the rim of the shell that connects the foot in the head to the shell itself, right.
Yeah, And it's also whatever holds all of our organs and guts in place. That membrane is very analogous to the mantle tissue of the snail because it holds all the organs in place. But it also does something really important. It secretes all of the stuff that eventually is built into the shell itself.
That's right.
So are we at the shell partner? You think.
You know what? This is a good We're twenty minutes in. I think we should take a break, Yeah, because that shell formation is quite a cliffhanger. Okay, and we'll be back after this, all right, So we promised to talk to you a little bit about the shell. A snail shell is beautiful. You should never ever ever smash a snail shell or a snail because that's animal cruelty and it's a terrible thing to do, so just don't do it. Right, But it is basically there's a little bit of protein in there, but it's mainly something called calcium carbonate, and it is, like you said earlier, secreted by that mantle tissue, and it builds up over time. It's if you look at sort of the center part of that shell, that's the oldest part of the shell. You can tell a snail's age by how big that shell is. And that's also the hardest part of the shell because it's been around longer. So they just keep adding material along that outer edge little by little as it expands outward. And that is why a like the outer edge of a snail shell will be much more you know, sort of breakable than the inside harder part.
That makes sense. So the oldest part is the closest to the to the center. Yeah, apparently also, I didn't realize this they're born with a tiny shell already attached. They just grow it over time by secrete starter starter shell exactly, and then you yeah, they're born like little tiny baby snails like that preformationism theory from our things we used to believe before the Scientific Method episode.
That's right.
So I also said, Chuck, the mantle holds the mantle tissue holds all the the important guts and stuff like that in place. And the way that snails breathe is through the mantle cavity. They have blood vessels in there, but they breathe using kind of like a primitive I don't want to say long. I think that's kind of a stretch, but basically, they have an opening that it's.
Called a lung. I've seen it called the lung in diagrams.
Okay, so I've also seen it called a numistome, and it's essentially a breathing port that they can open and close using their muscles that takes in air and exhales air. But it's pretty neat, and it's right there next to their head, right there at the aperture where everything else that needs to be outside is.
Yeah, and they can. If you're talking about sea snails. Like I said, we're not going to get two into them, but they can have similar body parts in terms of breathing, or they can also have gills kind of upfront as well.
Yeah. So one of the things snails are most famous for is there mucus, right, Yeah, that is apparently secreted by the foot, and as the foot moves along, it's just a series of muscles that just kind of propel as they ripple, propel the snail along, but they lay down a trail of mucus that does a lot of different things. For one, it allows the snail to do some Spider man esque moves, like just crawl right up the side of a building because it's very strong.
It's glue like, yeah, but it can be it's funny because it can be glue like or act as a lubricant exactly, which is pretty remarkable.
Yeah. So yeah, it also separates the snail from the rest of the world that it's running over. You know, it's strong like glue, but it also allows the snail to move smoothly, and it also protects the snail's body from sharp things that it might be crawling over slowly crawling over. And it also keeps the moisture locked inside. So much so that snail mucin, as we'll see, has been used for millennia as like kind of a skin thing. If you have very dry skin and you can get your hands on sna mucan or mucus, it will cure your dry skin.
Yeah, I mean that's what keeps the I mean that and other things is what keeps that snail moist So if it's if it's keeping the snail alive, then imagine what it can do for your crow's feet exactly. I don't think we said what was actually made of. It's enzymes, peptides, proteins, trace minerals, and it's it's pretty remarkable stuff. It's you know, the tailtale sign is when you see that stuff on the sidewalk, and just the term snail trail itself, that sort of snotty, glistening, shiny snail trail is you know, it's become sort of part of the lexicon to you know, as a stand in for other things at times.
So yeah, for sure. So one of the other things that the snail trail, the mucous trail does is it says, hey, sailor come come this way. Right, because it's one way that snails find one another to mate, which is surprising that they mate because they're hermaphroditic. They both all snails or most species of land snails are equipped with both male and female sex organs, and when they come together to mate, it's there's no telling who's who or who's doing what, because in the end both of them often come away with fertilized eggs.
Yeah, I mean, to me, this section is the most remarkable stuff about snails. How they reproduce is just amazing. They are hermaphroditic because and it just makes sense if you're moving point five inches per second, you would die out as a species if you if like a male had to search for a female or the other way around. So they basically just double their chances of finding somebody within the you know, ten feet or so that they're they're wandering around. I mean, they move more than that within a lifetime obviously, but you know, if it's that time of year, which is what like.
Autumn, sure, autumn and spring.
Autumn and spring, they're gonna wander around, They're gonna find another snail. They're gonna dance around each other and that just means very slowly circle each other. For I saw four to six hours. I saw. The whole thing can take up to twelve hours. It's a very obviously as you would imagine, a very slow process.
It is slow, but it's really involved, like they are really into it while they're they're going at it.
Yeah, I mean they're they're and this is before they're going at it. This is when they're just sort of like sizing each other up. They're getting their steam, they're touching tentacles, they're biting each other's lips. Things are getting really pretty hot and heavy in there, and then they have something that is amazing, And I don't know if any other animal that has something like this. They have something called a love what they call a love dart. Love dart only forms after the first mating, so you have to have at least a little bit of sexual experience to even form a love dart. Sure, they take about a week to form, and you don't always have to have one to mate, because if you've used up your love dart and then you know within the week you want to go at it again, you can still do that. It's not necessary for reproduction, but it helps in reproduction. They form in the dart sack and is stored in a dart sack, and if you look at it, it's a little it is a little dart. It's got this little sharp harpoon like tip and they actually it says they shoot it, but it doesn't like fly through the air. It's more like a They stab one another with it.
Oh, I imagine it like ew and then just sailing a couple feet and then spraying.
That would be great. It's more like it's stabbing. But apparently it's very imprecise. This hydraulic pressure builds up as they circle and bite each other's lips, and then they shoot this thing out each other and it can I think about a third of the time. It doesn't even do what it's intended to do, which we'll get to in a sect, but it can pierce organs. It can go all the way through the head and out the other side. So it's it's really crazy. It's a weird adaptation.
Yeah, no, it's super weird. And the I think what's most weird about it to me is there's other animals that do that to deliver sperm. That's not what the snails are doing. These love darts deliver other hormones that help protect the sperm as it makes its way to the eggs to fertilize. It's like a really clumsy, superfluous extra step that, like you said, doesn't even like they miss a lot of the time. They still manage to fertilize eggs. It's just a very strange thing that they do. But it's part of this really long, really slimy courtship mating process that they get involved in. And then the sex itsel is like just one rubs its foot against the other foot and there you.
Go, right, and they say who's pregnant which and they go, I don't know, Yeah, maybe both of us.
Yeah, both of us?
Actually can it be both?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, that both both can walk away with fertilized eggs after this.
Yeah, and they can lay. I think they can hatch up to four hundred and fifty eggs per year and when and that doesn't take very long actually, right in the gestation period it can be like really short.
Right for some species, especially in captivity, it can be twenty four hours. Others it seems like the outside is four weeks and usually in the while it's like two to four weeks for gestation.
Yeah, and once those little guys are born, they may immediately start eating the rest of the eggs as their first meal.
Yeah, it's kind of a bummer, especially because leading up to it, it's so cute, this little tiny snail with its little tiny shells inside its egg and it starts tapping its way out until it cracks through the egg. And then yeah, it grewsome eats its siblings very quickly. Sometimes it'll eat smaller siblings that have already hatched, not just the eggs. What I didn't realize though, is that some and that's that's actually not all snail species. That's ones that will eat eggs, but for the most part they'll eat just vegetation. Yeah. The snail parent will often stay nearby to provide protection for the young snail hatchlings for a little.
While they hang out for a while, right, Yeah.
I did not realize though. I thought it was pretty cool.
Yeah, they can. They can hang out for up to three months together while the parents are kind of protecting them. And like you said, they're born with that little baby shell and just gets bigger and bigger. They did we talk about how long they can live.
No, we didn't. It's pretty spectacular.
Yeah, I mean in the wild they can live up to five years, which that shocked me quite frankly.
Yeah, really, I feel bad for all the snails you've accidentally stepped on after a rainy evening.
You hope at least they were old.
Yeah, exactly, like they had their time.
Yeah, so five years is a pretty long time in the wild. I think in captivity they can live up to twenty five years, which is astounding.
Yeah. There's a really great little short documentary called The Strange and Wonderful World of the Snail Wrangler. It's on YouTube, and it's about this woman who takes photos of her snail friends in like little miniature settings, human settings. It's really cute, and she talks about one of her snail companions that she's been with for like ten years, and it's just I mean, when you think of it like that, like snails are just so they're off doing their own thing. They live in a world far different from ours, even though we share the same geography. It's just a different world. So when you cross paths with one, you're like, hey alien, and they're probably like hey, giant alien, and that's it, the idea that they're there in that same patch as long as you are. In some cases, when you're like if you live at a house for ten years, a snail might have lived there just as long as you did for the same time, like you shared that with them that whole time. It's they're not just this anonymous, generic animals running around. They I mean, anything that lives that long, there's just something more substantial to it than you would think initially.
Are you saying a snail has a soul?
I think it's pretty clear.
Yes, all right, so snails are doing their things. I love this account that Alison found that was a scientist from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History that said snails are leaky bags of water that survive on dry land. And it almost sounds like they're saying like they happen to survive, because it doesn't seem like a snail was really made for that environment. But they survive anyway because snails really need to stay moist, like a snail. Drying out just like a slug, means certain death. So even though there are snails in the desert, you're mainly going to find snails in more moist areas. We're gonna say that word quite a bit. I apologize, I.
Was gonna say, unlike humans, moist is a snail's favorite word.
It really is. They do live on the ground, mainly if they are terrestrial snails, but they can live in trees, but they really like it down there on the ground in that sort of moist outer layer of decaying plant matter. They're pretty active at night because things can get wetter overnight, as we know, like when you wake up with like morning dew and stuff like that. So they're just down there on the ground, sometimes eating meat and other snails and other eggs. But generally what they're doing is eating and munching down on that either decaying plant matter, or if you have a garden, they will also munch down on your nice new fresh plants.
Yeah, and as we'll see that, they run a foul of gardeners for that reason. But just hold your horses, gardeners, put your rubber mallets away for a second until we get to that part and talk you out of it. But in that leaf litter layer, they do a lot of really important stuff they are in charge of, like recycling plant matter, decaying stuff. They love decaying everything in addition to live plants to they love dead plants. And when they're doing that, they're like recycling nutrients. They eat that stuff, they break it down, and they poop it out, and that means it's bioavailable in the soil for plants to use, for other animals to come along and like that, like to lick the dirt, that kind of thing. They also are really important in the food web because calcium is not really easy necessarily to come by in food at least if you're like a small like an invertbrate or a mammal or something like that. If you eat a snailshell, you get a burst of calcium, So that snailshell is really important. And then they're also chock full of protein themselves, so they're like a really important part of any food web in the ecosystem that they live in.
Yeah, they're also moving stuff around down there. I mean, plant matter in that outer layer that just sits and sits isn't great. But if they're if you've got thousands of snails moving around through it, it's going to help drainage out, it's going to help keep distributing those nutrients if there's you know, it can help move dirt and clay even very important. All that stuff is great. And they can actually help pollinate too. Some of them are nighttime pollinators. They get in there with that plant nectar, they eat that stuff and then they poop that out as well.
Yeah, pretty crazy. I had no idea that they were pollinators. It just makes them even more important, you know what I mean totally. So I think, Chuck, we take a break and then we come back and talk about why you should leave the snails alone. How about that.
Let's do it.
So one thing that we said earlier, Chuck, was that snails run a foul of gardeners, and the reason why is because they will I mean, they will eat a lot of plants. The burgundy snail also known as the Roman snail, the one that's mostly used for s cargo these days. They weigh twenty gramsish as an adult, but they'll eat six grams of plant matter in a day. Yeah, you have a bunch of burgundy snails running around your garden. They're gonna eat your hostas, they're gonna eat your seedlings. They're going to tick you off. And so there's a lot of a lot of animal mosity that gardeners have towards snails and slugs too, and so the people have been trying things to get rid of snails for a very long time. The problem is number one, you don't actually want to get rid of snails, especially native snails or common garden snails. And number two, the methods typically used are chemical and they can harm other life as well. So there's you basically want to leave the snails alone as much as possible.
Yeah, there is some information here that Allison got from the Royal Horticultural Society in Britain, and they say, you know, don't use chemical pesticides please, Like, if you want to get rid of your snails, you can try and do so naturally by introducing predators. I guess you know, you throw a bunch of garden beetles out there and see what happens. Just say, who whoever walks out of here alive is, you know, deserves to live. It's like the thunder don't exactly to enter one leaves.
As a matter of fact, if you're bored, just go ahead and build a small scale replica of the thunderdome and put the snail in the beetle in you sick.
Oh, that's right, But then you have to act like Tina Turner and use that voice when Hello, raggedy snail, that's what you would have to call it.
That was a great impression, by the way, Chuck, thank you. In addition to putting them in a death match against beetles, you can go pick them out yourself. If you go out at night with the flashlight, you can pick up plenty of snails.
The thing is you put them in your neighbor's guard.
Yeah, exactly, Especially if they're a jerk hosta grower, they will really job them crazy. No, what you want to do is put them on your compost pile because again, they like decaying stuff and they're really useful, so they'll be pretty happy there. And you can also trap them by carving out like melons or grapefruit or something like that, and they'll be attracted to that, and it's just basically act as a trap. You just throw it back on your compost pile the next day and there you go.
All right.
Some people do, say you Some people still use pesticides. If you're organic, use peric phosphate, which interrupts their ability to digest so they die of starvation in a few days. There's another one called metaldehyde that is hardcore stuff. It desiccates them. They end up dehydrating to death, and it's banned in the EU because they consider it unacceptably harmful to birds and mammals. Here in the US, you can use it as much as you like, and they use it for the giant African land snail in particular, because again metaldehyde is hardcore stuff, and it turns out that the giant African land snail is hardcore snail.
Yeah, it's a hard core snail. Obviously, would be an invasive species here in North America. These are the big ones, the one that look like a bunny. I thought they can be eight inches long. They eat more than five hundred species of plant. They will eat everything and in their paths, including in Florida. They're a real problem in Florida. Apparently they will eat the stucco off your house to get more calcium. And they can pass disease along to people and animals. Yeah, rat lungworm, yeah, meningitis. I've seen that there. They can carry a host of parasites, or they can host a host of parasites some of which will is you know, good for the snail because it keeps animals from eating them, so it's like a defense mechanism, right, But that can be harmful to people at times as well.
Yeah, yeah, you don't want rat long worm. Like you said, it can create meningitis in humans, so it's best to not really handle snails with your bare hands, and especially don't eat the snail alive from your garden. Really bad idea.
Yeah, but people actually collect and I'm not sure if that's how they got here, but people collect these, you know, as an illegal pet, these giant African land snails.
That's my understanding that they were imported as illegal pets, at least to South the doing I don't know, but they also have been have shown up in some other places, including Hawaii and Polynesia, and somehow they got from Florida to these places, probably through the illegal pet trade. And so, in just typical human fashion in the fifties, people said, well, wait, there's this this snail called a rosy wolf snail, and it's a predator. It's a little literal snail predator. It's just import a bunch of them to take care of this giant African land snail because I'm sure nothing will possibly go wrong because of this plan. It's fool proof. And that's what they did, and as a result, Hawaii has lost almost all of its native snail species in the wild because the rosy wolf snail was like, I'd just rather eat these other kinds of snails than leave the giant African snail alone.
Yeah, these things are pretty creepy though. I imagine there's got to be some kind of nat geo video of the wolf snail, like, you know, following its prey because for a snail, they're moving pretty fast. Yeah. When they're tracking something, they go double to triple their normal speed. They will go up a tree after something. They will go underwater after something for a little while until they need to come up. It seems like they're just tenacious little fellas and they will go after something until they catch it.
Yeah, and they like to swallow other snails whole, including their shell.
Wow.
And there's a malacologist named Harry G. Lee who dissected a rosy wolf snail and found thirteen other snails shells in its gut.
Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot. It's like in a Louisiana state license plate.
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you don't want these things on your beautiful, pristine island. And once you bring them in, they're going to cause all sorts of problems. And that's what that Goodbye Snail video was about. It's definitely worth watching. But the rosy wolf snail is definitely considered invasive. And what I didn't know, Chuck, is the common garden snail, the one we're so familiar with, is considered invasive in the United States. Cornew espersum poof that is the common garden snail, and it was originally imported because it was the one that used to bees cargo and some of them escape from farms and set up shop in the wild. And now it's called the common garden snail because it became so prolific.
Yeah, and they don't know when people started eatinges cargo. And I think es cargo is the French name for that edible snail. And also doubles is the name of the.
Ish, right, Yeah, yeah, I think you're right, like French of us both.
Yeah, but you know, people like this stuff. It was always you know, growing up, you always heard about s cargo was like this you know, sort of as a as a kid, the first fancy, weird food you'd heard of, probably.
Like do the wealthy have no bounds? Kind of right.
Exactly, And then you know, we've got all signs. Should we finish up with just a bunch of kind of cool factoids?
Yeah, for sure.
Well jewelry. Snail shells have always or have long been used as jewelry for humans as some of the oldest known human jewelry. They found this stuff like necklaces and stuff made of sea snail shells that date back like at least one hundred and twenty thousand years.
That's nuts, man.
Yeah, what else?
The author Patricia high Smith, who was a very interesting person in her own right. She wrote The Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mister Ripple novels. She was a snail pal like the snail wrangler in that video that I talked about, And like the snail wrangler in that video that I talked about, she would go out in public with their snails as companions. There's a story of Patricia Highsmith at a party who was revealed to have dozens of snails in her purse who she brought so she'd have someone to talk to her snail friends.
Yeah, how about that?
How about that? That's what snail people do, is that kind of thing?
Yeah? Yeah, This is really interesting is they've been studying how snails might help us figure out Alzheimer's disease. From what I found is they've you know, we've talked about Alzheimer's before, which is when you have these amyloid plaque build up or plaques I guess that build up on the brain tissue, and they don't exactly know how it causes memory loss. But this is what they're trying to figure out what the snails. These plaques are formed from a protein called amyloid beta, which we've talked about, or a beta, and they have taken a beta and put it on otherwise very healthy pond snails. I have no idea why they chose, like why they thought the pond snail was a good candidate.
To begin with, terrible lobbying group.
Maybe that's what it is. But they put this a beta on these healthy pond snails and within twenty four hours they show evidence that they have harmed their memory basically, but the finding is that they haven't found any damage to the brain tissue. Like no cell loss, no brain tissue damage at all. So basically what they're they have sort of you know, the result of all that is that a beta by itself can trigger the memory loss and it's not from like damage to the brain or like a deterioration of the brain or the plant builds up, right, Yeah, exactly. They think it's like a specific pathway for memory that's being damaged and the brain itself.
Thank you pond snails.
I know it's amazing.
I also saw it goes the other way too, that the common garden snails mucus has been found to be bioactive as an anti inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti apoptic, which means it prevents cell death. Oh wow, So they think that they are figuring out how to turn that into a drug to treat Alzheimer's too. So snails are just coming at us with the one two punch to battle Alzheimer's disease. Yeah, God bless it. Speaking of God bless them, if you're subscribe to the West African Yoruba religion, you would say God bless the snail because they're associated with Obitala, the Skyfather, as well as the Arisha's collective deities to whom the land snail, the giant African land snail in particular, is sacred.
I gotta read this last thing. This is the only last thing I got. Okay, this Nigerian snail recipe. Yeah, I'm not into eat snails. They call this congo meat. It's got red pepper, havinio's okay onion, all right, and then a season with cayenne and ground crayfish.
Yeah. You lost me at Hobin Euro but it does sound extremely interesting. I would try it. I'd just be like, can you leave the hobbin niro out?
Too hot?
Too hot?
Yeah? Too hot for the hot tub, yeah.
Too hot for TV.
Uh huh.
So I've got one more thing, chuck, let's hear it. Uh. There is a weird thing that started popping up at the end of the thirteenth century in northern France. If you look through illuminated manuscripts, meaning manuscripts that have the doodles in the margins and all that like a map magazine, yeah, you will start to notice there are pictures of nights battling giant snails.
Oh yeah, that's so interesting.
And they It lasted for like one hundred or so years is like a trend. It actually came back again for a little while in the fifteenth century, and no one has any idea what they were trying to say. One of the theories is that is just it's hilarious that it was men who's like kind of comic relief. While you're reading like this kind of heavy text or whatever, you just look over and you're like, that's a night battling a snail. Right.
Yeah.
Other people say that the snails symbolize something like superhuman strength because they carry their house on their back. I kind of pooh pooh that one. I like this the comic relief one.
And people were just like, hey, this is funny. Look at this. This night's fighting a snail.
Yeah, this will be good for a laugh, said the medieval monk. Very interesting, I say so too. So if you want to know more about snails, everybody, go forth research them. You could do worse than watching The Strange and Wonderful World of the Snail Wrangler. And Goodbye snails. And if you see a snail in your garden, and especially if it's not doing anything to harm things, you just tip your hat to it and say, good day, snail. You could be as much as five to ten years old. That's right, Chuck said, that's right. It means it's time for listener mail.
Yeah, we're gonna do a correction. I wish we could this one out sooner because we're going to continue to get emails about the great isotope ion. My goodness issue, which I didn't know is an issue. This was we had a lot of them. But this is from Nick Lufty, PhD student at U see Irvine and Nick is getting a PhD in quantum chemistry.
Oh wow, man, I want to hang out with you, Nick.
And Nick listens with his wife Dinah. Hey Dinah, and said, can't wait till we're in town for a show. But if you're at Irvine, I mean Irvine, how far is that from San Francisco.
I have no idea.
I mean it's in the state of California. So Scott to just be like an.
Hour away exactly. Yeah, everything in California is an hour away.
Come see us. Hey, guys, wanted to offer a slight correction about the periodic table. Don't hate me. When you mentioned the different weighted averages being a result of different isotopes, you mentioned that it is a loss or gain of an electron that constitutes the different isotopes. This is actually incorrect. What you've defined is an ion, not an isotope. It is the varying number of neutrons that makes up the different flavors of isotopes. This is the thing that makes carbon dating possible. I love that episode. By the way. Last thing, guys, chemistry as a whole is a very inaccessible branch of STEM. I hated it. I failed my first chemistry class in one day. Our professor was out sick, and the chair of the chem department came to sub in and she implored us to get a PhD in chemistry. I said to myself, she must be nuts. Here I am ten years later and I am clearly the one who is nuts. The long and short of this last bit is to never give up on science. Nice And that again is from Nick. I think it said lufty, but it's actually lutfi.
Okay, like chipotle chipolte. Yeah, that's right, Thanks a lot, Nick. We'll call him nick L from now on. Yeah, that was a great one. So everybody who wrote in to let us know, we appreciate you for doing that, because we like to get things right. And that was definitely a slip up and it is something that we needed to correct for sure. So good job Chuck picking that one.
Yeah.
Well, if you want to get in touch with us and let us know we got something wrong or we got something right, or tell us something about yourself or your dog or your pet goat doesn't matter, you can send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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