May 11, 2017 • 48 mins
The world of slugs and snails is a grotesque circus of fever-dream horrors and biological marvels. Join Robert and Christian for a six-species dive into their life cycles of slime, iron plating, deadly neurotoxins and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff works. Calm, hey, you,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger, and today we're gonna
talk about something that squicks a lot of people out.
Slugs and snails. How do they bother you? Well, the
(00:26):
way I've long looked at them is um, snails are okay.
Slugs are a little disgusting, right, and and slugs are
always snails. When I discover a snail, I feel like
it's kind of a treat, like, oh, look there's a
snail and it's carrying its home on its back, a
little piece of nature. Yeah. But when the slugs come,
I feel like the slugs have come just to wig
me out. Like last last easter, well the easter before last,
(00:49):
we did the thing where he hid the painted eggs
in the backyard. We got got my son out there
to look for him, but the slugs had already found them,
and the slugs were crawling on the eggs. And so
the year I had to I had to hide them
all up high to keep the keep the slugs from
coming out and engrossing me. That's interesting. I wonder if
a slug would try to eat an egg if it could.
(01:10):
I guess it depends on the slugs. Some of the
ones we're going to talk about today could potentially, but
I don't know that they would necessarily eat egg yolk.
I don't know they were on these eggs though. Slugs.
I do want to say that I'm not the kind
of person who goes around melting slugs. I don't want
to harm slugs. Slugs are great, They do their job,
(01:31):
they they have a role to play in the ecosystem.
I just usually don't like to look at them. There
is something inherently, I guess alien about them, and the
idea that the reason why I was attracted to it
and I've been thinking about it is the idea of
something that only has one foot, Like literally, I didn't
realize that, but that is how it's referred to. They
have a foot, and that foot is what just pulls
(01:55):
them along, and the sort of muscular contraction and flexing
I think is what freaks people out a little bit.
Um But then snails are really as We're gonna get
into the same thing, just with a pretty shell, and
we're we're okay with them. Well, and then of course
they're the sea slugs. And we're gonna be talking about
some sea slugs today and they're often just incredibly beautiful,
(02:18):
so many different fabulous colors going on, and with many
other sea gastropods as well. But uh, but yeah, for
some reason, it's the it's the weird gray or sometimes
yellow land slugs that creep me out. And of course
there's so many. You look at any particular snail or
slug and their their life cycles are so fascinating, their
(02:39):
biology is so wondrously grotesque and you can't look away. Yeah, well,
let's get into that. Actually, like the actual anatomy that's
sort of genera of gastropods. So, gastropods are a six
hundred million year old type of mollusk that sometimes have
a single shell. Those are the snails, and their body
(03:00):
is asymmetrical. That's something I didn't know. I guess I
always assume that the bodies were symmetrical. As of twenty fifteen,
we know that there are thirty five thousand species of
these gastropods. Uh, they vary in structure, they have different
lifestyles as we're gonna talk about today. The smallest are
barely visible like there's teens, teensy tiny ones and then
(03:21):
the largest, which are usually sea slugs can weigh up
to thirty pounds, and all the gastropods. They can occur
in marine, fresh water or land habitats. Uh. Most of
them are what we would classify as hermaphroditic. They can
mate with any other mature animal of their species, and
they lay eggs. Usually they lay their eggs and water.
(03:42):
Although we'll talk today about some some kind of oddities
and the egg laying of snails and slugs on the
hermaphrodite issue. I do want to point out we have
an older episode that he did with that I did
with Julie. It's worth checking out in the archive because
we go into the topic of slug reproduction and it's
men strange details at length. Yeah, that particular slug is
(04:04):
really interesting, and I think you also have a blog
post related to that episode that I found as well. Yeah,
I mean there's I have a number of blog posts
devoted to slugs from just the strange ways that they
reproduce with others or with themselves and uh, and also
the topic what happens when a slug eats a psychedelic
mushroom I did for that topic. You know who I
(04:25):
thought of when I was doing the research for this,
Mara Hart. We've had on the show before talking about
marine creepy Crawley's and their sexual habits. Oh, I'm sure
she can weigh in on some CEA slugs. Yeah. Uh,
so they have weird bodies that goes without saying. But
just like if you want to sort of map out
their bodies in accordance to ours, their gills or their
lungs and their anus are actually above their head and
(04:49):
they have two separate pairs of tentacles, one for their
eyes for sight and another for smell. And I mean
it makes sense the anus above the head because if
you're gonna if you if you look at this snails
that their rear portion is in the shell, how are
you gonna get the waist out exactly? And then once
they lose the shells and evolve into different forms, they're
still going to keep the basic plumbing structure totally. Uh. Now,
(05:12):
here's the thing about snails and slugs that I didn't know,
and it is going to be important later. But the
way that they eat is through something called the rodula,
and it's a ribbon like tongue that has thousands of
tiny teeth on it, and basically they dragged this tongue
along the ground and scrape up food. Though there are
some carnivorous snails and we're gonna talk about one of
(05:33):
those today, they can bore holes through the shells of
other mollusks with these rodula to eat their flesh. So
they basically like suck out the insides of other basically
any other gastropod and some some mollusks, but usually a
snail or a slug. Their usual diet is something like
algae or leaves or lichen, sometimes small insects or tiny
(05:58):
marine organisms. But we also know that they eat decaying
plant and animal matter. That's that's usually when we think
of them, you know, as being like if you've got
like a compost pile or something like that, they'll show up. Yeah,
I mean that they're major decomposers, right right, So they're
important to the food chain. Uh, not just in the
sense that they eat decaying matter for us, but they
(06:19):
also serve as a source of food for fish and birds. Now,
of course, another one of the reasons why people don't
like them that much is they're all slimy. Uh. And
for land snails, the slimy thing is important because it
provides a slime track that helps with their movement. So
the way to think about this is it's this wave
like muscular contraction of their one foot, so it's like
(06:40):
a wave moves under their Imagine if you just had
one foot, you will cut off one of your legs
and you've just got the one foot and you don't
hop on it, but the foot kind of undulates underneath
you and propels you forward, and you're constantly spitting I guess,
on the ground to create some track that has less friction.
(07:00):
That's kind of their game. Okay. But snails also have,
as we know, outer shells, and these are both their
homes and their protection. When they're afraid, they'll close up
in them. And here's something I didn't know about snails.
I thought it was just like turtles, right, they just
like sucked up inside of it. They actually have plates
that are under their bodies that will like help seal
(07:23):
up that situation to keep them even more protected. And
there's all types. I mean, like when you think about
snails and slugs, like you've got abalone marine snails that
people eat. You've got the common garden snail, and then
you've got those huge conscious conscious conkers conks, Yeah, that
you mainly know because of how big their shells are
(07:46):
and people use them for like horns and stuff like that. Um,
but yeah, there's just there's this huge variety of them.
They're all over the world there, even in the Arctic
and antarcticle, which I think is fascinating. Yeah. So there
are so many fascinating specimens we could talk about here,
but we know we have limits, both limits in terms
(08:07):
of time and limits in our ability to gaze deep
into the gastropod world. Can you imagine if we did
an episode where we just talked about all thirty five
thousand species to be a long episode, yeah, yeah, or
we just have to shout out there and I can't
do the math in my head, but I wonder how
long the episode would be. It's a lot of just
had to shout the Latin names. Yeah, so we're only
gonna tackle six here in this episode. Um, I think
(08:29):
most of these are gonna be marine gastropods. The weirdest
tend to be marine, although there are a few land
ones that have well we'll get into it. But there's
some weird evolutionary reasons why they're on land now. So
we basically chose our rogues gallery of of gastropods here
that we wanted to cover today, the weirdest ones that
(08:50):
we found the most interesting. Yeah, and as we go,
one a little fun game we can play, I think
is think of a of a Marvel mutant that matches
up the the grotesque powers of this particular gastropod, right, yeah,
because they all, yeah, they basically have their own power sets.
All right, So I'm going to kick it off with
the first one here. This is a really fascinating specimen
(09:14):
that is known as the scaly foot gastropod, which is
not the greatest name. I feel like it's it's a
little generic sounding. Yeah, we're coming up. We're going to
have one that I want the audience to help us
actually come up with a name for. Some of these
guys have got common names like scally foot ghost slug
We're gonna talk about later. They could be better though. Yeah,
(09:35):
So the scaly foot gastropod, it's the common name for
crystal malon squamotherum. Sounds good to me. Yeah, it's a
it's a deep sea hydrothermal vent snail, and it certainly
doesn't disappoint on our expectations for alien hydrothermal event biology.
It's essentially it made me think of like a weapon
(09:57):
X program snail, and particularly it made me think of
this this guy Cyber. He's like, what a Wolverine's enemies
from the nineties, right, like Wolverine. Everybody knows Wolverine because
Wolverines at the automantium clause. So they were like, what
we need to make a bad guy that Wolverine can't cut.
So they came up with this guy who, like, I
think they doused his skin in automantium or something like that.
(10:18):
He has an adamantium shell. And I mainly remember him
because he was in like a Super in Nes Wolverine game.
Yeah yeah, and you like fight him in the astral
plane for some reason. But yeah, but that's who I
can seem totally disposed of the purpose of his armor.
Cyber fans and cyber experts will have to to ride
in with their thoughts so reach The researchers discovered the
(10:39):
scaly foot gastropod in n during an expedition to its
home the carry Indian Vent, a series of deep gouges
in the seafloor along with a volcanic mountain chain below
the Indian Ocean. So we're talking two point five miles
beneath the surface. And remember geothermal vents are offen home
for extreme of file organisms creatures that adapt to high
(11:01):
temperatures in the dark. For instance, that this is the
kind of place where find microbes that use chemosynthesis to
turn vent ecosystem chemicals into energy. And here amid the
black smokers or geothermal chimneys that boil up into the
sea and boil the sea. Um, this is where you'll
find the scaly foot gasterpod. A place where they're high
(11:23):
temperature fluctuations, high acidity, and there are predators. You have
to deal with two crabs and other snails. So what
is your your your average extremeophile gastropod gonna do to survive. Yeah,
I mean we've gone over this on the show before,
but that part of the world is really the most
alien we can get, like on the planet Earth, and
(11:44):
the things that survive and evolve around those events seem
to give us some sort of indication of what we
might expect on other worlds, right, Like I think, um,
it was it Europa, It might have been or something else,
Like people were speculating that Europa maybe has similar vents
under the ice, uh, and that there could be similar
creatures surrounding their events. Yeah, Joe and I refer to
(12:06):
a few of the different moons where they have, you know,
Jovian or or or Saturn moons that have the possibilities
for that kind of life. And indeed, astrobiologist in trying
to conceive what life would be like under there if
it existed, frequently turned to these examples. So what's the
scaly foot gastropod due to protect itself? Well, like cyber,
(12:28):
it has some serious body armor. In fact, it has
a trifold basically a riddle of bodily protection. The outer
layer is embedded with iron sulfite granules, the middle layer
is a thick organic layer, and then the inner layer
is calcified, you know, essentially like a normal snail shell.
So this is like the plate mail of the snail world. Like,
(12:49):
it's got three separate layers of dense material protecting it.
And it's not just again, it's not just the shell.
Like if you look at the scaly foot like it's
got these these armor dridges coming out of its sides. Yeah,
and the each layer is interesting in and of itself,
but the really fascinating thing is the way they work together.
So I'm gonna go through each layer here real quick.
(13:11):
So the outer layer, we're essentially talking about iron sulfide nanoparticles,
and the scaby foot gastropod or or SFG if you will,
is the only organism we know of to really incorporate
these into its shell. Here. Uh, it's it's able to
acquire these particles from the water around the black smokers,
which is rich with the with these particles interesting from
(13:35):
the environment to build it neat. Yeah, and uh, this
is also a very thin layer. It's the thinnest of
these three layers, but it's the strongest. Now, when force
is applied to the outside, such as you know when
a crab comes a clawn, the outer layer cracks, But
the cracks are are are fine, they're tiny. They dissipate
the energy and prevent larger shell shattering cracks from occurring.
(13:57):
And the tough iron also grinds back against the tackers weapon.
So this is like you remember that science experiment that
we all had to do in high school where you
had to drop an egg off of your the roof
of your school. Did you do that one? I don't
remember us ever getting to go up on the roof
and do it. I remember seeing it on TV. Like
Mr Wizard, I went to two separate high schools, and
(14:17):
then we did it at both of them. You know,
so they give you an egg and they say, you've
got to figure out a way using science to drop
this off. I think the way like I ended up
doing it was putting it in a jar of peanut
butter and having the peanut butter absorbed the shock. But
this seems like a smart way to do it, right.
You've got that first outer layer that absorbs and spreads
the connect energy across these cracks exactly. And yeah, yeah,
(14:41):
I mean it comes down to the situation with the
with the egg experiment. Children are trying to you know,
maybe a science teacher trying to solve this engineering problem.
How do you cushion the egg? But as always, you
can look to evolution. Evolution has spent millions and millions
of years cracking these problems. No punting life will find
a way, all right. So that's the outer layer. The
(15:03):
middle layer soft and spongy, just you know, nothing but
snail flesh, and it absorbs the force of the blow
and dissipates the impact even more before it hits that
inner layer. And again that inner layer is just calcium carbonate,
which is in keeping with most snail shells. But here's
the thing. Remember how I mentioned that this environment is
very acidic. Well, if it was, if you just had
(15:24):
a normal snail and a normal snail shell out there,
the shell would dissolve away in the acidic waters of
the vent environment. So the outer layers seal this inner
layer in from the acidic water and guard it from
bursts of intense heat that might cook it. Oh wow, okay, okay, yeah,
that would be very convenient for the predators. It's just
dead cooked snails floating self cooking snack. So so yeah,
(15:49):
all three layers, they work together, and they're also potential
bio mimetic approaches and applications here where where scientists think
we could we could look at this and we could
develop better body armor, better vehicle armoring based on this
wonderfully evolved design. Yeah, that was one of the things
that I remember reading about the scalaly foot, and it's
(16:09):
it's fascinating in many of these examples of these weird snails,
how we're now looking at them and we're saying, like, Okay,
that's cool, that superpower is cool. How do we apply
that to our technology and take advantage of it. But
at the same time, they're usually in these environments that
are under threat and they could possibly go extinct. So
there's this like weird situation where I don't know about
(16:32):
the scaly foot, but some of the other ones are
gonna talk about later, where they're in areas where they're threatened,
and we have to say, well, like, we've got to
protect this area so that we have enough time with
the actual animal and researching it so that we can
then duplicate those efforts into our you know, iron Man technology.
I do hope that if they create a suit of
power armor based on this, it is some sort of
(16:54):
genetically engineered living mollss living gastro pod that you just
kind of swim into, that would be very cool. I'm
thinking of, um, do you remember that, Uh, We're gonna
talk about this in the other episode this week to
the the Great Ten, that superhero team from China the
August General and Iron he kind of has that thing
going on. He's got the weird like mollusky shell kind
(17:16):
of thing. Yeah, yeah, I like it. Somebody needs to
get started on this. Yeah, it started on the next
big gastropod based superhero. Well, from that one, we're going
to jump to my pick first off, which is the
selino clamis is brid ya, which is notoriously difficult to
(17:37):
say because it's a amllegation of Welsh and Latin uh
and it for short. Though people call this the ghost slug,
and the ghost slug is relatively new, so it has
no eyes, it's completely white, and it lives underground where
it feeds on earthworms. So remember what we were saying earlier,
most of them aren't carnivorous, but this is a carnivorous one.
(17:59):
It kills these earthworms with powerful blade like teeth. And
this multiple places referred to this said that when it
eats them, it sucks them in like spaghetti. Uh. It
won't even eat other plants like other slugs. It's like
it's exclusive to earthworms. I think I've seen I have
seen videos of this slug in action. It's it's richly disturbing.
(18:21):
And I think it's probably what inspired that sequence in
Peter Jackson's King Kong where Andy Circus gets his head
eaten by a giant slug. Oh yeah, I forgot all
about that. I can't because it doesn't and well, Andy
Circus got to keep acting though, wasn't he just like
King Kong himself too? Well? Yes, yes, but just it
wasn't actually Andy Circus. But I forget. I forget most
(18:43):
things about that movie except that scene where Andy Circus
is eaten by a giant, disgusting slug creature. Have you
seen the New Kong movie? No? I haven't. Oh, I
think you'll dig it. There's some full monster scenes in it.
It's it is a great like like Big dumb on
popcorn monster movie. I mean like I was surprised at
how gory it was and the crazy creatures they came
(19:05):
up with on a skull island to check it out.
But there were no ghost slugs. So the ghost slug
it has this anatomy that is slightly different in that
the breathing hole for the ghost slug is actually in
its tail. And get this, it can retract its head
inside out. Uh. The reason why is that this ability
(19:26):
helps them extend into earthworm burrows. So the way that
you tell a ghost slug apart from other white slugs
is that it has a disc shaped mantle on the
rear of its body. Usually other slugs have the mantle
of sort of over what we would refer to as
the shoulders of the slug. And get this, the tentacles
that I referred to earlier, we all know those little
(19:48):
like snail slug tentacles that we think of. These ones
don't have any eye spots, so that's the other way
to tell them apart. There's no little, you know, dark
holes where they were technically see through. It possibly indicates
that this is an animal that evolved inside a cave
system before it got to where it is today. It
can also extend itself up to a hundred and ten millimeters,
(20:10):
So I mean, that's not that big, but it sounds
sounds big when you think about big a millimeter is
this is a garden slug. Basically all of that is
legitimately making my my stomach feel a little uneasy. Yeah there, Well,
that's the thing is and I highly recommend you know,
if you're listening to this episode, you're nearby a computer
or your phone or something. Take a look at what
these look like on Google image searches. We're going through them.
(20:32):
The ghost slug is unsettling. There's something very unsettling about it,
especially the white flesh of a I don't know how
you describe slug flesh. I've been I've been thinking about
this a lot lately because it is fleshy in the
same way as human flesh, but it's I don't know,
it's it's got some textures, some tactile nature to it.
(20:53):
That's repellent. M slug like, Yeah, that that's that's the
Oh and by the way of any and out there
does want to see pictures of these creatures, I'll try
to have an image of each one on the landing
page for this episode. It stuff to blow your mind
dot awesome. Okay, So the ghost slug was actually first
noticed in two thousand seven in Cardiff Whales. So that
(21:15):
makes me think that it couldn't have been an inspiration
for for that cong movie because didn't that come out
in like two thousand five? Yeah? Um, but there's other
white slugs anyways. So they found it in Cardiff. It
was named by experts at the National Museum there and
they basically figured out like, Okay, this thing lives in
(21:36):
meter deep soil. The name, remember I said, it has
this combination. Welsh name is bridge. Yet I know I'm
butchering that, but I'm sorry, guys, I'm not well like
a dark slug. Gods, it has a really cool origin
for its name. So that is the Welsh word for
ghost is brid uh and because of it being a
(21:57):
spooky nocturnal hunter, that's why they named it that way.
The selenea Clamas name uses the Greek words for cloak
and Selene, the goddess of the moon. So the technical
name for this thing is ready for it, the moon
cloaked ghost slug. Oh man, that is good. That's like
classic D and D monster anal territory um. So they
(22:18):
think it was introduced to Britain actually through potted plants,
which means it's alien to the region. It belongs to
a subspecies that's called Trio gon no clama d day.
Let's hope I got that right. Uh. And this is
specifically found in Turkey and Georgia, but not whales, so uh.
(22:39):
In there is actually a research paper that was published
they narrowed down its origin to the crimea area, and
a lot of what we've learned about the ghost slug
since then has been through citizen science. This is kind
of cool. So people have been networking with British experts
through social media, taking pictures and sending them over two
(23:00):
teams that are working on, you know, gathering up taxonomy
information about the ghost slug. Over three people have sent
in responses. Most of them have been misidentifications, but they
have now narrowed down twenty five populations of ghost slugs
in Wales. Most of them live in gardens. They're they're
fine around human beings. But hey, if you're an earthworm,
(23:20):
watch out. It just makes me want to protect the
earthworms from because it's spaghetti time. If you're an earthworm,
you want to take a break, let's do it. Let's
take a quick break to collect ourselves after all of that,
and when we come back, we will we will just
we will explore the world of the geographer Cone. Alright,
(23:43):
we're back. You know, as terrifying as that last slug was,
as you mentioned, it's absolutely no threat to humans. Yeah,
it's just gross. Yeah, the same cannot be said. However,
for the geographer Cone, this sounds like something that John
d would have like laying around on his alchemy table.
It does sound slightly alchemical, doesn't it. Uh So, there
(24:04):
are roughly six hundred and forty known species of cone snails,
but this one, in particular, Conus Geographists, is by far
the deadliest. So the cone shell itself is uh four
inches ten centimeters to six inches fifteen centimeters long, and
it's not that impressive really. If you spent much time
(24:25):
hunting shells at beaches, you've likely seen some form of
a cone shell before. It always makes me think of
a hot dog bun for some reason, you know what
kind of do Yeah? I think hopefully everyone's a picturing
the what I'm talking about here. Otherwise, check out the
picture on the landing page. It's not a perfect description,
but it's roughly the shape. It's not a it's it's
not not that it's an ugly shell. It's just not
(24:49):
generally what you think of is just a you know,
put on the shelf, beautiful kind of just yeah. So,
the geographer is another one of these um snails that
is a stone cold carnivore, and it feeds on mollusks.
It feels it feeds on worms. But here, get this,
It even feeds on fish, live fish. They're slow movers
(25:11):
that they pack a deadly toxin laced harpoon. I'm trying
to all right, let's let's walk us through this. So
this snail shoots a harpoon out of its body through
the water, up out of fish that's nearby. Yeah, that's
exactly how it goes down. Now, of course you're wondering
where it does a where is a geographer cone get
its harpoon? Well, you mentioned we talked about its mouth part,
(25:33):
the snail mouth parts earlier, about that that kitanus radula. Right,
it's essentially a small tooth, essentially a snail tooth. So
when the geiograt geographer cone senses its prey, it loads
one of these uh these teeth into their probiscus and
then they coat them with this special venom cocktail, and
(25:55):
then they shoot it to the passing creature, paralyzing it,
and then they eat the prey along with the harpoon. Wow. Okay,
so this is like if I I'm going to do
a human analysis here, Okay, if I yanked out one
of my canine teeth and I shoved it up my
nose and then I like did a snot rocket shooting
it across the room, but it like kills a fish.
(26:17):
The velocity is so fast that it pierces the fish,
and the mucus from my nose is poisonous to the fish. Yeah,
and you would also be in a Cronenberg film, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
In fact, wasn't the existence right? They have the gun,
they have human teeth. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we've talked
about that on the show before. Well, basically the same thing,
very cronin Berger creature, this geographer cone. Now the venom
(26:40):
in question is quite remarkable as well. It's a poisonous
mixture of a hundred different toxins, and if you look
at all the cone snail species out there, scientists say
they are probably fifty thousand different toxins among all of them.
So this cocktail makes for a potent neurotoxin, dangerous enough
to take out any natural prey animal that the comb
(27:02):
would be encountering, but it can also take out a human.
According to BBC, they're around a thirty known human deaths
from geographer cones, and a person has about a thirty
percent chance of surviving if you get stung by one. Wow,
So I'm thinking of like umu, the tetra to talks
in that we've talked about before that is used in
(27:25):
Haitian rituals, to the whole zombie thing that we talked
about in the Serpent in the Rainbow episode. Yeah, it's
probably similar to that, although that tetra to talk comes
from a puffer fish, I think, yeah, how Yeah, you know,
it's certainly the comparable situation there, But for the most part,
you don't have to worry about this creature unless you're
hanging out in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, various
(27:47):
Indo Pacific reefs, the Australian coast, and um you know,
if I were to stick with the go back to
the Marvel theme, I guess this creature would kind of
be Merrow. Isn't that the one that shoots bones out
of the marrow? Her power was that, like she could
grow any of her bones out and just pull bones
right out of her body and use them as various
weapons harpoons. Yeah, yeah, well how about the ghost us
(28:11):
now we forgot to Yeah, the ghost snail is tough,
but I guess the closest one I could think of
from from sort of x Men is uh, do you
remember Caliban? He was actually in the more recent Logan
movie Stephen Merchant. He's at the leader. But yeah, he's
like an albino who is able to detect other mutants
(28:35):
I think, like through pheromones or something like that. And
the ghost slug mainly uses chemo receptors to find these
earthworms and chew them up. So yeah, alright, so we've
got we've got some real obscure X Men characters here
so far, Cyber Caliban and Marrow. All right, what's up next?
Another difficult to pronounce name and this stuff to blow
(28:55):
your mind? Listeners, this is your opportunity. We can contribute together.
Come together, let's come up with a good name for
this weird thing I'm about to present you, because it
does not have a common name. Its name right now
is opice those toma verum iculum, and the word verum
iculum literally means wormy. So that's that's not a whole
(29:18):
you know that, that's that's not very descriptive. We can
do better than that, So help us out here, guys,
because this this thing is crazy. When we think of
a snail shell, we're usually picturing something that spirals and
coils in a logarithmic manner around a single access, but
shells are part of a snail's interface and how they survive.
(29:39):
Some marine vermitids can deviate away from this, and they
have been known to have up to two or three
different axes that the snail shell spins around. Okay, and
while most shells spin in a right handed manner, there's
also something that's referred to as sinestroid spirals. Wow, it's
(30:00):
trying to go d C on us. It doesn't sound
like that, right, Yeah, And these go their left handed
and usually shell whorls that's an official term w h
O r l s. Wharrels do not reattach to their
preceding quarrels. You're kind of channeling the room there a
little bit. Yeah. Um. So this gastropod that we're talking
(30:23):
about here, though, is super atypical and it's real puzzling.
It actually has four discernible coiling accesses and its worlds
reattached to themselves. One scientist described this as biological madness. Uh,
it's really hard to study because it's only a few
millimeters high, and every time they've been collected they just die.
(30:44):
So we don't know a whole lot about how they live.
This thing. Based on our Geiger episode we're talking about,
I think this thing would give give hr Geeger and
jungi Edo nightmares. It looks something straight out of one
of Geeger's paintings. It's like this weird organic plumbing pipe
or rocket engine kind of thing, and it spins around
(31:04):
in swirls in different formations. Now, scientists have been trying
to figure out why this is, and they've ruled out
hybridization as a possibility because they examined multiple subjects and
they found similar strict developmental genetic control between all of
the subjects. They've looked at the shells evolved for a
(31:25):
variety of reasons, mainly for either and this is just
general snail shells, not this particular one. They can evolve
for coping with predation, for feeding to make movement easier,
and even for sexual selections. So I suppose that like,
you know, one snail looking at another snail shell and
say like that's kind of hot, I'm interested, let's move on. Uh,
(31:46):
But why this snails shell uncoils is totally unclear. It
might even hinder its movement and leave the shell even
more vulnerable the structural damage. This is like the opposite
of the scaly foot gastropod. It's develop up this snail
shell that we don't know what its purpose serves. It
actually makes it slower and weaker, but it looks really weird.
(32:09):
They are found in Malaysia, and unlike any of the
other multi access snails, this one's a land dweller. There's
some concern that the escalation of limestone quarrying in this
area in Malaysia may actually cause its extinctions. So this
is related to what I was talking about earlier, or
that there may be new undiscovered species that they could
(32:31):
be studying. The area was formed by erosion from an
ancient marine sediment, So the idea here they think that
what happened was that the snail originally evolved to help
with flotation in a marine environment, and then the sediment
eroded away, the water went away, they were left in
the ground, and now we've got these bizarre four axes
(32:54):
snails that are really just I mean, they're not evolved
to cope with or environment. You know, I can't like,
like I said, they've never captured a living one, and
so I'm trying to imagine like how it even moves
through the ground because it's got this basically looks like
a pretzel. Uh this uh, this bizarre snail piping thing
(33:15):
that's on it. Well, the genti edo comparison seems rather
apt because a lot of the horrors that he creates,
you just look at it and it's not it's not
it's not like so many monsters and creations where you're like, oh,
I can see how that thing moves and exists, and
it's basically a a a real world predator that's been transformed.
(33:36):
Like his stuff looks like it should not be and
just doesn't jive with reality totally. And he's got that
whole book about spirals Zumaki, and it's like the horror
of the book is that, like people keep seeing spirals
in varying parts of nature, sometimes in people's hair, sometimes
in I can't even remember. There might be one that's
(33:57):
a snail shell. But these things basically drive people into madness. Now,
if they saw one of these in Gengo's stories, they
to be done with. Well, maybe it should be the
Gungi snail, Yeah, I like that, or the Zamaki snail. Yeah, Okay,
Now if it were a Marvel mutant who to be
this is tough. The first one that comes to mind
(34:17):
for me. Do you remember this guy? He was in
the Generation X team in the nineties. His name was
Skin and his power was that his skin was bigger
than the rest of his body, Like it was too
big for his the frame of his body, so he
could like stretch his skin out really far. And it
wasn't like Mr Fantastic where he was like elastic. He
(34:39):
the rest of his body was normal, but it's just
like his skin was really long, so he could like
wrap his skin up around himself into weird configurations and
like he's like I am elbow flesh Man. Yeah, basically,
like he just had like hanging flesh all over his body. Yeah. Yeah,
I think I think he's the best I've got. I
don't know. There's gotta be. There's gotta be I'm weird
(35:00):
mutant out there that's got like a weird twisty shell,
but I can't think of them. All right, Well, let's
take one more break and then when we come back,
we'll explore two more amazing specimens from the gastro pod world.
All right, we're back, So we have two more to
cover here, and again we'll put pictures up at us
(35:22):
at the at the landing page for this episode stuff
to blow your mind dot com. But uh I for
my final specimen that I'm covering here, I wanted to
cover a solid gastro pod rogue. Uh So I was
tempted to cover the beautiful blue dragon or Glaucus atlanticus.
This is that weird, almost bird like alien looking creature
(35:45):
with six appendages and a brilliant blue cover its color.
It looks like a slug bird. Yeah. I saw pictures
of this one when I was looking at the various
slugs for us to cover. It's gorgeous. Yeah, and they
they they're interesting too. And then they feed on Portuguese
Man of Wars, you know, which is insane the jelly
fish feature, and it absorbs their stinging nematicis cells for
(36:07):
their own protection. So that's a pretty good rogue. But
I I could not ignore the the the allure of
the green sea slug or the Elysia chlorotica. Now, what
makes the green sea slug fascinating is that it actually
steals the power of photosynthesis from algae. Yeah, and it
(36:28):
stands apart from pretty much everything because it's not merely
one creature housing another and and uh and taking on
some sort of forced symbiotic relationship, because I think we
can all think of examples of that, right, I mean,
to a certain extent, each of us is an example
of that. So no, in this case, it only takes
the photosynthesizing or organelles called chloroplasts from the algae it
(36:52):
feeds on. And it does this by puncturing the algial
cell wall with its radula and sucking out the goods.
And then these bits are incorporated into the green slugs
own body and it and it keeps them here in
working order for the remainder of its life for about
a year. So through the process of pacosytosis see slug
(37:15):
cells engulf the cells of the algae and make the
chloroplasts a part of their own cellular content. Wow. Okay,
so they're essentially gene thieves. And can they subsequently use
the energy that the chloroplasts or absorbing. Yeah, they don't.
They don't have to eat again for the rest of
their lives. That is useful. Yeah. Now, the chloroplasts seem
(37:38):
to partially run on stored up supplies, but they also
function so in the slugs even passed the chlorophyll producing
trait onto their young their offspring. Though they had those
offsprings still have to eat a bunch of algae to
actually carry out the photosensor systems where kickstart everything. You know,
what I'm curious about is if some more research was
done on this particular one, if it's going to be
(37:59):
like the um pomp pomp crab that we talked about
a couple episodes ago, and that they take algae from
each other as well, that would be interesting. Yeah, because certainly,
as we've explored the gastropod lord what world is, it
can be a cruel place, So it would not surprise me. Now,
these creatures live in the salt marshes of New England
and Canada, so they know they're not too far away
(38:20):
from us. They're they're not as distant a species. Okay,
so we got to come up with a mutant here.
You've got any ideas well? I instantly think of of
like DC characters like swamp Thing, and yeah, who's the
vegetable man man, oh, the fluoronic Man, and then Marvel's
version is man Thing. Uh. In the X Men universe,
(38:42):
I think there's a character called a no la, but
I think it's like more like a lizard guy and
he has this kind of thing like where lizards regrow
limbs and things like that. But I don't know if
it's connected to plant uh physiology in any way. Well,
it's it's essentially a hybrid of plant and animal. So
is there a plant animal mutant not that I can
(39:02):
think of off the top of my head. There's gotta be,
and I'm just not I don't know it. Often Yeah,
carrot man. Maybe there's there's a what's his name, Captain Carrott.
I think that's a guy flaming carrot. Flaming Carrot. Oh
is that Marvel? No, it's like an independent like como. Yeah,
I feel like I've seen that before, but I went
sure where it belongs in the pantheon. Alright, Yeah, help
(39:24):
us out here if you've got one, If you know
your mutant lore better than we do, there's gotta be
somebody out there. But I think you're right. I think
this is a moment where I think a swamp thing
or man thinking team up with the X Men and
join the team for a little bit, because they absolutely
are basically made out of marsh muck, all right, last
one here. This one's got a very pretty name. The
(39:46):
moon snail or not a side. The moon snail is
predacious as well. You can see Robert and I are
going for a theme here. We're going for the stone
cold killers. Uh. It's a marine snail. It searches for
other bivalves under sandy shores. So the way it does
this is it wraps its foot around its prey and
(40:07):
suffocates it. But if this fails, it then uses a
gland to secrete acid and enzymes that soften up the shell.
So it goes for any other mollusks. It will even
go for other moon snails. It basically wraps itself around them.
If it can't suffocate them, then what it does is
(40:28):
it excretes these acids, bores a hole through the shell
using its ridula, it drills into the victims, and then
it eats them from within. It's an I drink your
milkshake kind of thing, so it literally like puts the
hole in and then it just sucks everything out of
the inside of the snail shell. Goodness um. And this
(40:50):
leaves behind these nice little beveled holes. So if you
ever find a shell on the beach and it has
like this perfect little drilled hole in it. That might
be why because because it was killed by one of
these moon snails. My son a looves to find those
because you can you can instantly make a necklace out
of them. Imagine, imagine. Know the people have done that
as well. I think that's part of what the moon
(41:11):
snail economy works on, is necklace making. It's actually thought
that the way that they find their victims is through
chemo reception, although my understanding is most snails and slugs
and other gastropods they're all using chemo reception through the
scent tentacles. Okay, this is where it gets gross. Let's
take something as an example that we all know, a clam. Okay,
(41:34):
it can eat an entire clam over the period of
a day, and it will keep going. If you put
a bunch of clams in front of it, it will
eat one five centimeter clam every four days. So it
just keeps chugging these things down. And it's important because
it has this other bizarre ability where it can inflate
(41:55):
its body to several times the size of its shell. Uh.
The way that does this is it has tissues that
are like hollow sinuses, and it draws seawater up into them,
and that makes it up to thirteen centimeters long, so
it's like that's how it helps it make it so
much bigger so it can do the suffocating thing. Normally
there are only two centimeters long. So this thing is
(42:17):
like swelling up to this massive size so they can
wrap itself around its victims. Now, for movement, it uses
the front part of the foot like a plow, so
it's like it's sort of like a I think of
it as like a cow catcher, and its scraping them up. Yeah,
and it like shoves its way through the dirt. Part
(42:38):
of the foot also protects its head like a shield
while it's moving through, and so you can see where
they've moved through under the sand because they leave these
little trails underword. But when they move by. Now, when
it lays eggs, this is a cool, uh sort of
reproductive fact. The moon snail. What it does is it
embeds mucus from its body and sand together and forms
(42:59):
a latinous sheet that hardens on the sand. And at
the center of this the snail will lay their eggs
in a collar formation. Each collar it's like this little
sheet of gelatinous sand contains thousands of eggs, and as
they hatch, they disintegrate. So and a lot of the
articles I read about this they said, look, look, if
(43:20):
you find one of these things, you know it's on
the ground, you can see, you can touch it. Like
that means there's still thousands of eggs in it. Don't
like pick it up and take it home, like wait
and let it dissolve in the eggs will hatch and
move on their way. Uh. But if you see a
moon snail shell on the surface, it's probably not a
(43:41):
moon snail. It's probably a hermit crab. So that's another factory.
Because they're usually drilling around underground. Mostly they're found around
the tropics, but these ones are also residents of the
waters beyond both the Arctic and Antarctic circles. They move
out into deeper waters during the winter, so they're they're
really fascinating. I mean, it sounds like they're brutal serial
(44:04):
killers of the gastropod world, but they they live everywhere. Wow. Yeah,
that is a that is a a terrifying specimen. Yeah,
now I know which mutant would it be? The whole
making its body bigger made me think of the block
right right, because can't he do that? I think his
body is just already big yeah. Um. But the one
I thought of was Toad. Do you remember him. He's
(44:26):
in the movies. He's played by that guy who played
Darth maul Um. Because Toad has like the super long
tongue and then, like some versions of him, can spit acid.
So I envisioned that, like, yeah, like similar to the
moon snail. He spits on like a shell and then
he just shoves his tongue down there and sucks things
out from the inside. So maybe like if you wanted
(44:47):
to eat Colossus, he wraps himself around Colossus and he
spits on colossus Is back. The acid burns through Colossus's
metal back, and then he puts his tongue into that
one little hole and just drinks, rinks up, slurps up
colossus meat. Well there you go. Yep. So gastropods fun.
We've got it. We've got a gross little team here. Yeah,
(45:09):
And and I mean the great thing about this is
there's so many out there. So if if everyone out
there is just really enamored by gastropods today, uh yeah,
we can we can totally uh get together another team. Yeah,
well this and you and I were talking about this
before him. But there is of course an X Men
character that is pretty much reviled by everybody whose name
is simply Maggot, and his power is he has to
(45:33):
like bio organic slugs that live inside his body and
he shoots them out and they run around and eat
through things and then come back and climb inside his body.
So you were telling me about this and it I
had not seen a picture of this character before, so
I instantly thought of the character in Clive Barker's Nightbreed,
his movie adaptation of Cabal, and I can't remember the
(45:55):
character's name, but there's one of the the Night Breed characters.
So it's like stomachs snakes that come out, and they're like, oh,
well that's that's cool. That sounds like it's basically that character,
but no, this is a crazy looking character design. Yeah,
he's like, um, he turns blue, and he's got like
kind of a like not a mohawk, but like a
weird kind of clipped little white hair thing hanging off. Uh.
(46:17):
And yeah, he was not popular. I don't think he
lasted very long. I think it was around like mid
late nineties that Maggot showed up around with Merrow, that
one that we mentioned earlier. Those two were introduced around
the same time. Well, Merrow at least made it into
the Street Fighter versus capcom games, remember counter there. I
think Merrow was more popular because of this the general
(46:38):
you know, brutal idea of like ripping your own bones
out and killing people with them like that kind of thing.
But this, uh, this Maggot guy, he doesn't like the
maggots or the creatures that he has. They don't even
really look like slugs or snails. No, they look like
little like robots kind of Yeah. So I just had,
like looking at a picture of it, just had a
hard time figuring out what I was supposed us to
(47:00):
feel about this character. He is technically a good guy,
as it were, but I don't believe that he's been
used very much in the comics for a long time.
But yeah, so if you just want your generic slug superhero,
that's the one to go for good to know. All right, Well, hey,
if you again, if you want to see pictures of
these creatures, head on over to stuff to Blow your
(47:22):
Mind dot com. That's where you'll find a landing page
for this episode, plus you'll find all the past episodes,
will find videos, you'll find blog posts, uh, and I
will include links to related slug and snail matters on
that landing page as well. And if you want to
write into us and let us know what we should
call that weird for access snail, well, there's lots of
(47:43):
ways to do it. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter,
we are on Tumbler, and we're on Instagram. I guess
you could take a picture on Instagram of your name,
or maybe you could draw this, uh, this crazy thing
once you've looked at it, and give it a name.
But I like the Usamaki snail. I'm leaning towards that.
But there's there's got to be something cool out there. Uh.
(48:05):
Or hey, you can just do it the old fashioned
way and you can just write us a letter at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
moralness and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com The
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff works. Calm, hey, you,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger, and today we're gonna
talk about something that squicks a lot of people out.
Slugs and snails. How do they bother you? Well, the
(00:26):
way I've long looked at them is um, snails are okay.
Slugs are a little disgusting, right, and and slugs are
always snails. When I discover a snail, I feel like
it's kind of a treat, like, oh, look there's a
snail and it's carrying its home on its back, a
little piece of nature. Yeah. But when the slugs come,
I feel like the slugs have come just to wig
me out. Like last last easter, well the easter before last,
(00:49):
we did the thing where he hid the painted eggs
in the backyard. We got got my son out there
to look for him, but the slugs had already found them,
and the slugs were crawling on the eggs. And so
the year I had to I had to hide them
all up high to keep the keep the slugs from
coming out and engrossing me. That's interesting. I wonder if
a slug would try to eat an egg if it could.
(01:10):
I guess it depends on the slugs. Some of the
ones we're going to talk about today could potentially, but
I don't know that they would necessarily eat egg yolk.
I don't know they were on these eggs though. Slugs.
I do want to say that I'm not the kind
of person who goes around melting slugs. I don't want
to harm slugs. Slugs are great, They do their job,
(01:31):
they they have a role to play in the ecosystem.
I just usually don't like to look at them. There
is something inherently, I guess alien about them, and the
idea that the reason why I was attracted to it
and I've been thinking about it is the idea of
something that only has one foot, Like literally, I didn't
realize that, but that is how it's referred to. They
have a foot, and that foot is what just pulls
(01:55):
them along, and the sort of muscular contraction and flexing
I think is what freaks people out a little bit.
Um But then snails are really as We're gonna get
into the same thing, just with a pretty shell, and
we're we're okay with them. Well, and then of course
they're the sea slugs. And we're gonna be talking about
some sea slugs today and they're often just incredibly beautiful,
(02:18):
so many different fabulous colors going on, and with many
other sea gastropods as well. But uh, but yeah, for
some reason, it's the it's the weird gray or sometimes
yellow land slugs that creep me out. And of course
there's so many. You look at any particular snail or
slug and their their life cycles are so fascinating, their
(02:39):
biology is so wondrously grotesque and you can't look away. Yeah, well,
let's get into that. Actually, like the actual anatomy that's
sort of genera of gastropods. So, gastropods are a six
hundred million year old type of mollusk that sometimes have
a single shell. Those are the snails, and their body
(03:00):
is asymmetrical. That's something I didn't know. I guess I
always assume that the bodies were symmetrical. As of twenty fifteen,
we know that there are thirty five thousand species of
these gastropods. Uh, they vary in structure, they have different
lifestyles as we're gonna talk about today. The smallest are
barely visible like there's teens, teensy tiny ones and then
(03:21):
the largest, which are usually sea slugs can weigh up
to thirty pounds, and all the gastropods. They can occur
in marine, fresh water or land habitats. Uh. Most of
them are what we would classify as hermaphroditic. They can
mate with any other mature animal of their species, and
they lay eggs. Usually they lay their eggs and water.
(03:42):
Although we'll talk today about some some kind of oddities
and the egg laying of snails and slugs on the
hermaphrodite issue. I do want to point out we have
an older episode that he did with that I did
with Julie. It's worth checking out in the archive because
we go into the topic of slug reproduction and it's
men strange details at length. Yeah, that particular slug is
(04:04):
really interesting, and I think you also have a blog
post related to that episode that I found as well. Yeah,
I mean there's I have a number of blog posts
devoted to slugs from just the strange ways that they
reproduce with others or with themselves and uh, and also
the topic what happens when a slug eats a psychedelic
mushroom I did for that topic. You know who I
(04:25):
thought of when I was doing the research for this,
Mara Hart. We've had on the show before talking about
marine creepy Crawley's and their sexual habits. Oh, I'm sure
she can weigh in on some CEA slugs. Yeah. Uh,
so they have weird bodies that goes without saying. But
just like if you want to sort of map out
their bodies in accordance to ours, their gills or their
lungs and their anus are actually above their head and
(04:49):
they have two separate pairs of tentacles, one for their
eyes for sight and another for smell. And I mean
it makes sense the anus above the head because if
you're gonna if you if you look at this snails
that their rear portion is in the shell, how are
you gonna get the waist out exactly? And then once
they lose the shells and evolve into different forms, they're
still going to keep the basic plumbing structure totally. Uh. Now,
(05:12):
here's the thing about snails and slugs that I didn't know,
and it is going to be important later. But the
way that they eat is through something called the rodula,
and it's a ribbon like tongue that has thousands of
tiny teeth on it, and basically they dragged this tongue
along the ground and scrape up food. Though there are
some carnivorous snails and we're gonna talk about one of
(05:33):
those today, they can bore holes through the shells of
other mollusks with these rodula to eat their flesh. So
they basically like suck out the insides of other basically
any other gastropod and some some mollusks, but usually a
snail or a slug. Their usual diet is something like
algae or leaves or lichen, sometimes small insects or tiny
(05:58):
marine organisms. But we also know that they eat decaying
plant and animal matter. That's that's usually when we think
of them, you know, as being like if you've got
like a compost pile or something like that, they'll show up. Yeah,
I mean that they're major decomposers, right right, So they're
important to the food chain. Uh, not just in the
sense that they eat decaying matter for us, but they
(06:19):
also serve as a source of food for fish and birds. Now,
of course, another one of the reasons why people don't
like them that much is they're all slimy. Uh. And
for land snails, the slimy thing is important because it
provides a slime track that helps with their movement. So
the way to think about this is it's this wave
like muscular contraction of their one foot, so it's like
(06:40):
a wave moves under their Imagine if you just had
one foot, you will cut off one of your legs
and you've just got the one foot and you don't
hop on it, but the foot kind of undulates underneath
you and propels you forward, and you're constantly spitting I guess,
on the ground to create some track that has less friction.
(07:00):
That's kind of their game. Okay. But snails also have,
as we know, outer shells, and these are both their
homes and their protection. When they're afraid, they'll close up
in them. And here's something I didn't know about snails.
I thought it was just like turtles, right, they just
like sucked up inside of it. They actually have plates
that are under their bodies that will like help seal
(07:23):
up that situation to keep them even more protected. And
there's all types. I mean, like when you think about
snails and slugs, like you've got abalone marine snails that
people eat. You've got the common garden snail, and then
you've got those huge conscious conscious conkers conks, Yeah, that
you mainly know because of how big their shells are
(07:46):
and people use them for like horns and stuff like that. Um,
but yeah, there's just there's this huge variety of them.
They're all over the world there, even in the Arctic
and antarcticle, which I think is fascinating. Yeah. So there
are so many fascinating specimens we could talk about here,
but we know we have limits, both limits in terms
(08:07):
of time and limits in our ability to gaze deep
into the gastropod world. Can you imagine if we did
an episode where we just talked about all thirty five
thousand species to be a long episode, yeah, yeah, or
we just have to shout out there and I can't
do the math in my head, but I wonder how
long the episode would be. It's a lot of just
had to shout the Latin names. Yeah, so we're only
gonna tackle six here in this episode. Um, I think
(08:29):
most of these are gonna be marine gastropods. The weirdest
tend to be marine, although there are a few land
ones that have well we'll get into it. But there's
some weird evolutionary reasons why they're on land now. So
we basically chose our rogues gallery of of gastropods here
that we wanted to cover today, the weirdest ones that
(08:50):
we found the most interesting. Yeah, and as we go,
one a little fun game we can play, I think
is think of a of a Marvel mutant that matches
up the the grotesque powers of this particular gastropod, right, yeah,
because they all, yeah, they basically have their own power sets.
All right, So I'm going to kick it off with
the first one here. This is a really fascinating specimen
(09:14):
that is known as the scaly foot gastropod, which is
not the greatest name. I feel like it's it's a
little generic sounding. Yeah, we're coming up. We're going to
have one that I want the audience to help us
actually come up with a name for. Some of these
guys have got common names like scally foot ghost slug
We're gonna talk about later. They could be better though. Yeah,
(09:35):
So the scaly foot gastropod, it's the common name for
crystal malon squamotherum. Sounds good to me. Yeah, it's a
it's a deep sea hydrothermal vent snail, and it certainly
doesn't disappoint on our expectations for alien hydrothermal event biology.
It's essentially it made me think of like a weapon
(09:57):
X program snail, and particularly it made me think of
this this guy Cyber. He's like, what a Wolverine's enemies
from the nineties, right, like Wolverine. Everybody knows Wolverine because
Wolverines at the automantium clause. So they were like, what
we need to make a bad guy that Wolverine can't cut.
So they came up with this guy who, like, I
think they doused his skin in automantium or something like that.
(10:18):
He has an adamantium shell. And I mainly remember him
because he was in like a Super in Nes Wolverine game.
Yeah yeah, and you like fight him in the astral
plane for some reason. But yeah, but that's who I
can seem totally disposed of the purpose of his armor.
Cyber fans and cyber experts will have to to ride
in with their thoughts so reach The researchers discovered the
(10:39):
scaly foot gastropod in n during an expedition to its
home the carry Indian Vent, a series of deep gouges
in the seafloor along with a volcanic mountain chain below
the Indian Ocean. So we're talking two point five miles
beneath the surface. And remember geothermal vents are offen home
for extreme of file organisms creatures that adapt to high
(11:01):
temperatures in the dark. For instance, that this is the
kind of place where find microbes that use chemosynthesis to
turn vent ecosystem chemicals into energy. And here amid the
black smokers or geothermal chimneys that boil up into the
sea and boil the sea. Um, this is where you'll
find the scaly foot gasterpod. A place where they're high
(11:23):
temperature fluctuations, high acidity, and there are predators. You have
to deal with two crabs and other snails. So what
is your your your average extremeophile gastropod gonna do to survive. Yeah,
I mean we've gone over this on the show before,
but that part of the world is really the most
alien we can get, like on the planet Earth, and
(11:44):
the things that survive and evolve around those events seem
to give us some sort of indication of what we
might expect on other worlds, right, Like I think, um,
it was it Europa, It might have been or something else,
Like people were speculating that Europa maybe has similar vents
under the ice, uh, and that there could be similar
creatures surrounding their events. Yeah, Joe and I refer to
(12:06):
a few of the different moons where they have, you know,
Jovian or or or Saturn moons that have the possibilities
for that kind of life. And indeed, astrobiologist in trying
to conceive what life would be like under there if
it existed, frequently turned to these examples. So what's the
scaly foot gastropod due to protect itself? Well, like cyber,
(12:28):
it has some serious body armor. In fact, it has
a trifold basically a riddle of bodily protection. The outer
layer is embedded with iron sulfite granules, the middle layer
is a thick organic layer, and then the inner layer
is calcified, you know, essentially like a normal snail shell.
So this is like the plate mail of the snail world. Like,
(12:49):
it's got three separate layers of dense material protecting it.
And it's not just again, it's not just the shell.
Like if you look at the scaly foot like it's
got these these armor dridges coming out of its sides. Yeah,
and the each layer is interesting in and of itself,
but the really fascinating thing is the way they work together.
So I'm gonna go through each layer here real quick.
(13:11):
So the outer layer, we're essentially talking about iron sulfide nanoparticles,
and the scaby foot gastropod or or SFG if you will,
is the only organism we know of to really incorporate
these into its shell. Here. Uh, it's it's able to
acquire these particles from the water around the black smokers,
which is rich with the with these particles interesting from
(13:35):
the environment to build it neat. Yeah, and uh, this
is also a very thin layer. It's the thinnest of
these three layers, but it's the strongest. Now, when force
is applied to the outside, such as you know when
a crab comes a clawn, the outer layer cracks, But
the cracks are are are fine, they're tiny. They dissipate
the energy and prevent larger shell shattering cracks from occurring.
(13:57):
And the tough iron also grinds back against the tackers weapon.
So this is like you remember that science experiment that
we all had to do in high school where you
had to drop an egg off of your the roof
of your school. Did you do that one? I don't
remember us ever getting to go up on the roof
and do it. I remember seeing it on TV. Like
Mr Wizard, I went to two separate high schools, and
(14:17):
then we did it at both of them. You know,
so they give you an egg and they say, you've
got to figure out a way using science to drop
this off. I think the way like I ended up
doing it was putting it in a jar of peanut
butter and having the peanut butter absorbed the shock. But
this seems like a smart way to do it, right.
You've got that first outer layer that absorbs and spreads
the connect energy across these cracks exactly. And yeah, yeah,
(14:41):
I mean it comes down to the situation with the
with the egg experiment. Children are trying to you know,
maybe a science teacher trying to solve this engineering problem.
How do you cushion the egg? But as always, you
can look to evolution. Evolution has spent millions and millions
of years cracking these problems. No punting life will find
a way, all right. So that's the outer layer. The
(15:03):
middle layer soft and spongy, just you know, nothing but
snail flesh, and it absorbs the force of the blow
and dissipates the impact even more before it hits that
inner layer. And again that inner layer is just calcium carbonate,
which is in keeping with most snail shells. But here's
the thing. Remember how I mentioned that this environment is
very acidic. Well, if it was, if you just had
(15:24):
a normal snail and a normal snail shell out there,
the shell would dissolve away in the acidic waters of
the vent environment. So the outer layers seal this inner
layer in from the acidic water and guard it from
bursts of intense heat that might cook it. Oh wow, okay, okay, yeah,
that would be very convenient for the predators. It's just
dead cooked snails floating self cooking snack. So so yeah,
(15:49):
all three layers, they work together, and they're also potential
bio mimetic approaches and applications here where where scientists think
we could we could look at this and we could
develop better body armor, better vehicle armoring based on this
wonderfully evolved design. Yeah, that was one of the things
that I remember reading about the scalaly foot, and it's
(16:09):
it's fascinating in many of these examples of these weird snails,
how we're now looking at them and we're saying, like, Okay,
that's cool, that superpower is cool. How do we apply
that to our technology and take advantage of it. But
at the same time, they're usually in these environments that
are under threat and they could possibly go extinct. So
there's this like weird situation where I don't know about
(16:32):
the scaly foot, but some of the other ones are
gonna talk about later, where they're in areas where they're threatened,
and we have to say, well, like, we've got to
protect this area so that we have enough time with
the actual animal and researching it so that we can
then duplicate those efforts into our you know, iron Man technology.
I do hope that if they create a suit of
power armor based on this, it is some sort of
(16:54):
genetically engineered living mollss living gastro pod that you just
kind of swim into, that would be very cool. I'm
thinking of, um, do you remember that, Uh, We're gonna
talk about this in the other episode this week to
the the Great Ten, that superhero team from China the
August General and Iron he kind of has that thing
going on. He's got the weird like mollusky shell kind
(17:16):
of thing. Yeah, yeah, I like it. Somebody needs to
get started on this. Yeah, it started on the next
big gastropod based superhero. Well, from that one, we're going
to jump to my pick first off, which is the
selino clamis is brid ya, which is notoriously difficult to
(17:37):
say because it's a amllegation of Welsh and Latin uh
and it for short. Though people call this the ghost slug,
and the ghost slug is relatively new, so it has
no eyes, it's completely white, and it lives underground where
it feeds on earthworms. So remember what we were saying earlier,
most of them aren't carnivorous, but this is a carnivorous one.
(17:59):
It kills these earthworms with powerful blade like teeth. And
this multiple places referred to this said that when it
eats them, it sucks them in like spaghetti. Uh. It
won't even eat other plants like other slugs. It's like
it's exclusive to earthworms. I think I've seen I have
seen videos of this slug in action. It's it's richly disturbing.
(18:21):
And I think it's probably what inspired that sequence in
Peter Jackson's King Kong where Andy Circus gets his head
eaten by a giant slug. Oh yeah, I forgot all
about that. I can't because it doesn't and well, Andy
Circus got to keep acting though, wasn't he just like
King Kong himself too? Well? Yes, yes, but just it
wasn't actually Andy Circus. But I forget. I forget most
(18:43):
things about that movie except that scene where Andy Circus
is eaten by a giant, disgusting slug creature. Have you
seen the New Kong movie? No? I haven't. Oh, I
think you'll dig it. There's some full monster scenes in it.
It's it is a great like like Big dumb on
popcorn monster movie. I mean like I was surprised at
how gory it was and the crazy creatures they came
(19:05):
up with on a skull island to check it out.
But there were no ghost slugs. So the ghost slug
it has this anatomy that is slightly different in that
the breathing hole for the ghost slug is actually in
its tail. And get this, it can retract its head
inside out. Uh. The reason why is that this ability
(19:26):
helps them extend into earthworm burrows. So the way that
you tell a ghost slug apart from other white slugs
is that it has a disc shaped mantle on the
rear of its body. Usually other slugs have the mantle
of sort of over what we would refer to as
the shoulders of the slug. And get this, the tentacles
that I referred to earlier, we all know those little
(19:48):
like snail slug tentacles that we think of. These ones
don't have any eye spots, so that's the other way
to tell them apart. There's no little, you know, dark
holes where they were technically see through. It possibly indicates
that this is an animal that evolved inside a cave
system before it got to where it is today. It
can also extend itself up to a hundred and ten millimeters,
(20:10):
So I mean, that's not that big, but it sounds
sounds big when you think about big a millimeter is
this is a garden slug. Basically all of that is
legitimately making my my stomach feel a little uneasy. Yeah there, Well,
that's the thing is and I highly recommend you know,
if you're listening to this episode, you're nearby a computer
or your phone or something. Take a look at what
these look like on Google image searches. We're going through them.
(20:32):
The ghost slug is unsettling. There's something very unsettling about it,
especially the white flesh of a I don't know how
you describe slug flesh. I've been I've been thinking about
this a lot lately because it is fleshy in the
same way as human flesh, but it's I don't know,
it's it's got some textures, some tactile nature to it.
(20:53):
That's repellent. M slug like, Yeah, that that's that's the
Oh and by the way of any and out there
does want to see pictures of these creatures, I'll try
to have an image of each one on the landing
page for this episode. It stuff to blow your mind
dot awesome. Okay, So the ghost slug was actually first
noticed in two thousand seven in Cardiff Whales. So that
(21:15):
makes me think that it couldn't have been an inspiration
for for that cong movie because didn't that come out
in like two thousand five? Yeah? Um, but there's other
white slugs anyways. So they found it in Cardiff. It
was named by experts at the National Museum there and
they basically figured out like, Okay, this thing lives in
(21:36):
meter deep soil. The name, remember I said, it has
this combination. Welsh name is bridge. Yet I know I'm
butchering that, but I'm sorry, guys, I'm not well like
a dark slug. Gods, it has a really cool origin
for its name. So that is the Welsh word for
ghost is brid uh and because of it being a
(21:57):
spooky nocturnal hunter, that's why they named it that way.
The selenea Clamas name uses the Greek words for cloak
and Selene, the goddess of the moon. So the technical
name for this thing is ready for it, the moon
cloaked ghost slug. Oh man, that is good. That's like
classic D and D monster anal territory um. So they
(22:18):
think it was introduced to Britain actually through potted plants,
which means it's alien to the region. It belongs to
a subspecies that's called Trio gon no clama d day.
Let's hope I got that right. Uh. And this is
specifically found in Turkey and Georgia, but not whales, so uh.
(22:39):
In there is actually a research paper that was published
they narrowed down its origin to the crimea area, and
a lot of what we've learned about the ghost slug
since then has been through citizen science. This is kind
of cool. So people have been networking with British experts
through social media, taking pictures and sending them over two
(23:00):
teams that are working on, you know, gathering up taxonomy
information about the ghost slug. Over three people have sent
in responses. Most of them have been misidentifications, but they
have now narrowed down twenty five populations of ghost slugs
in Wales. Most of them live in gardens. They're they're
fine around human beings. But hey, if you're an earthworm,
(23:20):
watch out. It just makes me want to protect the
earthworms from because it's spaghetti time. If you're an earthworm,
you want to take a break, let's do it. Let's
take a quick break to collect ourselves after all of that,
and when we come back, we will we will just
we will explore the world of the geographer Cone. Alright,
(23:43):
we're back. You know, as terrifying as that last slug was,
as you mentioned, it's absolutely no threat to humans. Yeah,
it's just gross. Yeah, the same cannot be said. However,
for the geographer Cone, this sounds like something that John
d would have like laying around on his alchemy table.
It does sound slightly alchemical, doesn't it. Uh So, there
(24:04):
are roughly six hundred and forty known species of cone snails,
but this one, in particular, Conus Geographists, is by far
the deadliest. So the cone shell itself is uh four
inches ten centimeters to six inches fifteen centimeters long, and
it's not that impressive really. If you spent much time
(24:25):
hunting shells at beaches, you've likely seen some form of
a cone shell before. It always makes me think of
a hot dog bun for some reason, you know what
kind of do Yeah? I think hopefully everyone's a picturing
the what I'm talking about here. Otherwise, check out the
picture on the landing page. It's not a perfect description,
but it's roughly the shape. It's not a it's it's
not not that it's an ugly shell. It's just not
(24:49):
generally what you think of is just a you know,
put on the shelf, beautiful kind of just yeah. So,
the geographer is another one of these um snails that
is a stone cold carnivore, and it feeds on mollusks.
It feels it feeds on worms. But here, get this,
It even feeds on fish, live fish. They're slow movers
(25:11):
that they pack a deadly toxin laced harpoon. I'm trying
to all right, let's let's walk us through this. So
this snail shoots a harpoon out of its body through
the water, up out of fish that's nearby. Yeah, that's
exactly how it goes down. Now, of course you're wondering
where it does a where is a geographer cone get
its harpoon? Well, you mentioned we talked about its mouth part,
(25:33):
the snail mouth parts earlier, about that that kitanus radula. Right,
it's essentially a small tooth, essentially a snail tooth. So
when the geiograt geographer cone senses its prey, it loads
one of these uh these teeth into their probiscus and
then they coat them with this special venom cocktail, and
(25:55):
then they shoot it to the passing creature, paralyzing it,
and then they eat the prey along with the harpoon. Wow. Okay,
so this is like if I I'm going to do
a human analysis here, Okay, if I yanked out one
of my canine teeth and I shoved it up my
nose and then I like did a snot rocket shooting
it across the room, but it like kills a fish.
(26:17):
The velocity is so fast that it pierces the fish,
and the mucus from my nose is poisonous to the fish. Yeah,
and you would also be in a Cronenberg film, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
In fact, wasn't the existence right? They have the gun,
they have human teeth. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we've talked
about that on the show before. Well, basically the same thing,
very cronin Berger creature, this geographer cone. Now the venom
(26:40):
in question is quite remarkable as well. It's a poisonous
mixture of a hundred different toxins, and if you look
at all the cone snail species out there, scientists say
they are probably fifty thousand different toxins among all of them.
So this cocktail makes for a potent neurotoxin, dangerous enough
to take out any natural prey animal that the comb
(27:02):
would be encountering, but it can also take out a human.
According to BBC, they're around a thirty known human deaths
from geographer cones, and a person has about a thirty
percent chance of surviving if you get stung by one. Wow,
So I'm thinking of like umu, the tetra to talks
in that we've talked about before that is used in
(27:25):
Haitian rituals, to the whole zombie thing that we talked
about in the Serpent in the Rainbow episode. Yeah, it's
probably similar to that, although that tetra to talk comes
from a puffer fish, I think, yeah, how Yeah, you know,
it's certainly the comparable situation there, But for the most part,
you don't have to worry about this creature unless you're
hanging out in the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, various
(27:47):
Indo Pacific reefs, the Australian coast, and um you know,
if I were to stick with the go back to
the Marvel theme, I guess this creature would kind of
be Merrow. Isn't that the one that shoots bones out
of the marrow? Her power was that, like she could
grow any of her bones out and just pull bones
right out of her body and use them as various
weapons harpoons. Yeah, yeah, well how about the ghost us
(28:11):
now we forgot to Yeah, the ghost snail is tough,
but I guess the closest one I could think of
from from sort of x Men is uh, do you
remember Caliban? He was actually in the more recent Logan
movie Stephen Merchant. He's at the leader. But yeah, he's
like an albino who is able to detect other mutants
(28:35):
I think, like through pheromones or something like that. And
the ghost slug mainly uses chemo receptors to find these
earthworms and chew them up. So yeah, alright, so we've
got we've got some real obscure X Men characters here
so far, Cyber Caliban and Marrow. All right, what's up next?
Another difficult to pronounce name and this stuff to blow
(28:55):
your mind? Listeners, this is your opportunity. We can contribute together.
Come together, let's come up with a good name for
this weird thing I'm about to present you, because it
does not have a common name. Its name right now
is opice those toma verum iculum, and the word verum
iculum literally means wormy. So that's that's not a whole
(29:18):
you know that, that's that's not very descriptive. We can
do better than that, So help us out here, guys,
because this this thing is crazy. When we think of
a snail shell, we're usually picturing something that spirals and
coils in a logarithmic manner around a single access, but
shells are part of a snail's interface and how they survive.
(29:39):
Some marine vermitids can deviate away from this, and they
have been known to have up to two or three
different axes that the snail shell spins around. Okay, and
while most shells spin in a right handed manner, there's
also something that's referred to as sinestroid spirals. Wow, it's
(30:00):
trying to go d C on us. It doesn't sound
like that, right, Yeah, And these go their left handed
and usually shell whorls that's an official term w h
O r l s. Wharrels do not reattach to their
preceding quarrels. You're kind of channeling the room there a
little bit. Yeah. Um. So this gastropod that we're talking
(30:23):
about here, though, is super atypical and it's real puzzling.
It actually has four discernible coiling accesses and its worlds
reattached to themselves. One scientist described this as biological madness. Uh,
it's really hard to study because it's only a few
millimeters high, and every time they've been collected they just die.
(30:44):
So we don't know a whole lot about how they live.
This thing. Based on our Geiger episode we're talking about,
I think this thing would give give hr Geeger and
jungi Edo nightmares. It looks something straight out of one
of Geeger's paintings. It's like this weird organic plumbing pipe
or rocket engine kind of thing, and it spins around
(31:04):
in swirls in different formations. Now, scientists have been trying
to figure out why this is, and they've ruled out
hybridization as a possibility because they examined multiple subjects and
they found similar strict developmental genetic control between all of
the subjects. They've looked at the shells evolved for a
(31:25):
variety of reasons, mainly for either and this is just
general snail shells, not this particular one. They can evolve
for coping with predation, for feeding to make movement easier,
and even for sexual selections. So I suppose that like,
you know, one snail looking at another snail shell and
say like that's kind of hot, I'm interested, let's move on. Uh,
(31:46):
But why this snails shell uncoils is totally unclear. It
might even hinder its movement and leave the shell even
more vulnerable the structural damage. This is like the opposite
of the scaly foot gastropod. It's develop up this snail
shell that we don't know what its purpose serves. It
actually makes it slower and weaker, but it looks really weird.
(32:09):
They are found in Malaysia, and unlike any of the
other multi access snails, this one's a land dweller. There's
some concern that the escalation of limestone quarrying in this
area in Malaysia may actually cause its extinctions. So this
is related to what I was talking about earlier, or
that there may be new undiscovered species that they could
(32:31):
be studying. The area was formed by erosion from an
ancient marine sediment, So the idea here they think that
what happened was that the snail originally evolved to help
with flotation in a marine environment, and then the sediment
eroded away, the water went away, they were left in
the ground, and now we've got these bizarre four axes
(32:54):
snails that are really just I mean, they're not evolved
to cope with or environment. You know, I can't like,
like I said, they've never captured a living one, and
so I'm trying to imagine like how it even moves
through the ground because it's got this basically looks like
a pretzel. Uh this uh, this bizarre snail piping thing
(33:15):
that's on it. Well, the genti edo comparison seems rather
apt because a lot of the horrors that he creates,
you just look at it and it's not it's not
it's not like so many monsters and creations where you're like, oh,
I can see how that thing moves and exists, and
it's basically a a a real world predator that's been transformed.
(33:36):
Like his stuff looks like it should not be and
just doesn't jive with reality totally. And he's got that
whole book about spirals Zumaki, and it's like the horror
of the book is that, like people keep seeing spirals
in varying parts of nature, sometimes in people's hair, sometimes
in I can't even remember. There might be one that's
(33:57):
a snail shell. But these things basically drive people into madness. Now,
if they saw one of these in Gengo's stories, they
to be done with. Well, maybe it should be the
Gungi snail, Yeah, I like that, or the Zamaki snail. Yeah, Okay,
Now if it were a Marvel mutant who to be
this is tough. The first one that comes to mind
(34:17):
for me. Do you remember this guy? He was in
the Generation X team in the nineties. His name was
Skin and his power was that his skin was bigger
than the rest of his body, Like it was too
big for his the frame of his body, so he
could like stretch his skin out really far. And it
wasn't like Mr Fantastic where he was like elastic. He
(34:39):
the rest of his body was normal, but it's just
like his skin was really long, so he could like
wrap his skin up around himself into weird configurations and
like he's like I am elbow flesh Man. Yeah, basically,
like he just had like hanging flesh all over his body. Yeah. Yeah,
I think I think he's the best I've got. I
don't know. There's gotta be. There's gotta be I'm weird
(35:00):
mutant out there that's got like a weird twisty shell,
but I can't think of them. All right, Well, let's
take one more break and then when we come back,
we'll explore two more amazing specimens from the gastro pod world.
All right, we're back, So we have two more to
cover here, and again we'll put pictures up at us
(35:22):
at the at the landing page for this episode stuff
to blow your mind dot com. But uh I for
my final specimen that I'm covering here, I wanted to
cover a solid gastro pod rogue. Uh So I was
tempted to cover the beautiful blue dragon or Glaucus atlanticus.
This is that weird, almost bird like alien looking creature
(35:45):
with six appendages and a brilliant blue cover its color.
It looks like a slug bird. Yeah. I saw pictures
of this one when I was looking at the various
slugs for us to cover. It's gorgeous. Yeah, and they
they they're interesting too. And then they feed on Portuguese
Man of Wars, you know, which is insane the jelly
fish feature, and it absorbs their stinging nematicis cells for
(36:07):
their own protection. So that's a pretty good rogue. But
I I could not ignore the the the allure of
the green sea slug or the Elysia chlorotica. Now, what
makes the green sea slug fascinating is that it actually
steals the power of photosynthesis from algae. Yeah, and it
(36:28):
stands apart from pretty much everything because it's not merely
one creature housing another and and uh and taking on
some sort of forced symbiotic relationship, because I think we
can all think of examples of that, right, I mean,
to a certain extent, each of us is an example
of that. So no, in this case, it only takes
the photosynthesizing or organelles called chloroplasts from the algae it
(36:52):
feeds on. And it does this by puncturing the algial
cell wall with its radula and sucking out the goods.
And then these bits are incorporated into the green slugs
own body and it and it keeps them here in
working order for the remainder of its life for about
a year. So through the process of pacosytosis see slug
(37:15):
cells engulf the cells of the algae and make the
chloroplasts a part of their own cellular content. Wow. Okay,
so they're essentially gene thieves. And can they subsequently use
the energy that the chloroplasts or absorbing. Yeah, they don't.
They don't have to eat again for the rest of
their lives. That is useful. Yeah. Now, the chloroplasts seem
(37:38):
to partially run on stored up supplies, but they also
function so in the slugs even passed the chlorophyll producing
trait onto their young their offspring. Though they had those
offsprings still have to eat a bunch of algae to
actually carry out the photosensor systems where kickstart everything. You know,
what I'm curious about is if some more research was
done on this particular one, if it's going to be
(37:59):
like the um pomp pomp crab that we talked about
a couple episodes ago, and that they take algae from
each other as well, that would be interesting. Yeah, because certainly,
as we've explored the gastropod lord what world is, it
can be a cruel place, So it would not surprise me. Now,
these creatures live in the salt marshes of New England
and Canada, so they know they're not too far away
(38:20):
from us. They're they're not as distant a species. Okay,
so we got to come up with a mutant here.
You've got any ideas well? I instantly think of of
like DC characters like swamp Thing, and yeah, who's the
vegetable man man, oh, the fluoronic Man, and then Marvel's
version is man Thing. Uh. In the X Men universe,
(38:42):
I think there's a character called a no la, but
I think it's like more like a lizard guy and
he has this kind of thing like where lizards regrow
limbs and things like that. But I don't know if
it's connected to plant uh physiology in any way. Well,
it's it's essentially a hybrid of plant and animal. So
is there a plant animal mutant not that I can
(39:02):
think of off the top of my head. There's gotta be,
and I'm just not I don't know it. Often Yeah,
carrot man. Maybe there's there's a what's his name, Captain Carrott.
I think that's a guy flaming carrot. Flaming Carrot. Oh
is that Marvel? No, it's like an independent like como. Yeah,
I feel like I've seen that before, but I went
sure where it belongs in the pantheon. Alright, Yeah, help
(39:24):
us out here if you've got one, If you know
your mutant lore better than we do, there's gotta be
somebody out there. But I think you're right. I think
this is a moment where I think a swamp thing
or man thinking team up with the X Men and
join the team for a little bit, because they absolutely
are basically made out of marsh muck, all right, last
one here. This one's got a very pretty name. The
(39:46):
moon snail or not a side. The moon snail is
predacious as well. You can see Robert and I are
going for a theme here. We're going for the stone
cold killers. Uh. It's a marine snail. It searches for
other bivalves under sandy shores. So the way it does
this is it wraps its foot around its prey and
(40:07):
suffocates it. But if this fails, it then uses a
gland to secrete acid and enzymes that soften up the shell.
So it goes for any other mollusks. It will even
go for other moon snails. It basically wraps itself around them.
If it can't suffocate them, then what it does is
(40:28):
it excretes these acids, bores a hole through the shell
using its ridula, it drills into the victims, and then
it eats them from within. It's an I drink your
milkshake kind of thing, so it literally like puts the
hole in and then it just sucks everything out of
the inside of the snail shell. Goodness um. And this
(40:50):
leaves behind these nice little beveled holes. So if you
ever find a shell on the beach and it has
like this perfect little drilled hole in it. That might
be why because because it was killed by one of
these moon snails. My son a looves to find those
because you can you can instantly make a necklace out
of them. Imagine, imagine. Know the people have done that
as well. I think that's part of what the moon
(41:11):
snail economy works on, is necklace making. It's actually thought
that the way that they find their victims is through
chemo reception, although my understanding is most snails and slugs
and other gastropods they're all using chemo reception through the
scent tentacles. Okay, this is where it gets gross. Let's
take something as an example that we all know, a clam. Okay,
(41:34):
it can eat an entire clam over the period of
a day, and it will keep going. If you put
a bunch of clams in front of it, it will
eat one five centimeter clam every four days. So it
just keeps chugging these things down. And it's important because
it has this other bizarre ability where it can inflate
(41:55):
its body to several times the size of its shell. Uh.
The way that does this is it has tissues that
are like hollow sinuses, and it draws seawater up into them,
and that makes it up to thirteen centimeters long, so
it's like that's how it helps it make it so
much bigger so it can do the suffocating thing. Normally
there are only two centimeters long. So this thing is
(42:17):
like swelling up to this massive size so they can
wrap itself around its victims. Now, for movement, it uses
the front part of the foot like a plow, so
it's like it's sort of like a I think of
it as like a cow catcher, and its scraping them up. Yeah,
and it like shoves its way through the dirt. Part
(42:38):
of the foot also protects its head like a shield
while it's moving through, and so you can see where
they've moved through under the sand because they leave these
little trails underword. But when they move by. Now, when
it lays eggs, this is a cool, uh sort of
reproductive fact. The moon snail. What it does is it
embeds mucus from its body and sand together and forms
(42:59):
a latinous sheet that hardens on the sand. And at
the center of this the snail will lay their eggs
in a collar formation. Each collar it's like this little
sheet of gelatinous sand contains thousands of eggs, and as
they hatch, they disintegrate. So and a lot of the
articles I read about this they said, look, look, if
(43:20):
you find one of these things, you know it's on
the ground, you can see, you can touch it. Like
that means there's still thousands of eggs in it. Don't
like pick it up and take it home, like wait
and let it dissolve in the eggs will hatch and
move on their way. Uh. But if you see a
moon snail shell on the surface, it's probably not a
(43:41):
moon snail. It's probably a hermit crab. So that's another factory.
Because they're usually drilling around underground. Mostly they're found around
the tropics, but these ones are also residents of the
waters beyond both the Arctic and Antarctic circles. They move
out into deeper waters during the winter, so they're they're
really fascinating. I mean, it sounds like they're brutal serial
(44:04):
killers of the gastropod world, but they they live everywhere. Wow. Yeah,
that is a that is a a terrifying specimen. Yeah,
now I know which mutant would it be? The whole
making its body bigger made me think of the block
right right, because can't he do that? I think his
body is just already big yeah. Um. But the one
I thought of was Toad. Do you remember him. He's
(44:26):
in the movies. He's played by that guy who played
Darth maul Um. Because Toad has like the super long
tongue and then, like some versions of him, can spit acid.
So I envisioned that, like, yeah, like similar to the
moon snail. He spits on like a shell and then
he just shoves his tongue down there and sucks things
out from the inside. So maybe like if you wanted
(44:47):
to eat Colossus, he wraps himself around Colossus and he
spits on colossus Is back. The acid burns through Colossus's
metal back, and then he puts his tongue into that
one little hole and just drinks, rinks up, slurps up
colossus meat. Well there you go. Yep. So gastropods fun.
We've got it. We've got a gross little team here. Yeah,
(45:09):
And and I mean the great thing about this is
there's so many out there. So if if everyone out
there is just really enamored by gastropods today, uh yeah,
we can we can totally uh get together another team. Yeah,
well this and you and I were talking about this
before him. But there is of course an X Men
character that is pretty much reviled by everybody whose name
is simply Maggot, and his power is he has to
(45:33):
like bio organic slugs that live inside his body and
he shoots them out and they run around and eat
through things and then come back and climb inside his body.
So you were telling me about this and it I
had not seen a picture of this character before, so
I instantly thought of the character in Clive Barker's Nightbreed,
his movie adaptation of Cabal, and I can't remember the
(45:55):
character's name, but there's one of the the Night Breed characters.
So it's like stomachs snakes that come out, and they're like, oh,
well that's that's cool. That sounds like it's basically that character,
but no, this is a crazy looking character design. Yeah,
he's like, um, he turns blue, and he's got like
kind of a like not a mohawk, but like a
weird kind of clipped little white hair thing hanging off. Uh.
(46:17):
And yeah, he was not popular. I don't think he
lasted very long. I think it was around like mid
late nineties that Maggot showed up around with Merrow, that
one that we mentioned earlier. Those two were introduced around
the same time. Well, Merrow at least made it into
the Street Fighter versus capcom games, remember counter there. I
think Merrow was more popular because of this the general
(46:38):
you know, brutal idea of like ripping your own bones
out and killing people with them like that kind of thing.
But this, uh, this Maggot guy, he doesn't like the
maggots or the creatures that he has. They don't even
really look like slugs or snails. No, they look like
little like robots kind of Yeah. So I just had,
like looking at a picture of it, just had a
hard time figuring out what I was supposed us to
(47:00):
feel about this character. He is technically a good guy,
as it were, but I don't believe that he's been
used very much in the comics for a long time.
But yeah, so if you just want your generic slug superhero,
that's the one to go for good to know. All right, Well, hey,
if you again, if you want to see pictures of
these creatures, head on over to stuff to Blow your
(47:22):
Mind dot com. That's where you'll find a landing page
for this episode, plus you'll find all the past episodes,
will find videos, you'll find blog posts, uh, and I
will include links to related slug and snail matters on
that landing page as well. And if you want to
write into us and let us know what we should
call that weird for access snail, well, there's lots of
(47:43):
ways to do it. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter,
we are on Tumbler, and we're on Instagram. I guess
you could take a picture on Instagram of your name,
or maybe you could draw this, uh, this crazy thing
once you've looked at it, and give it a name.
But I like the Usamaki snail. I'm leaning towards that.
But there's there's got to be something cool out there. Uh.
(48:05):
Or hey, you can just do it the old fashioned
way and you can just write us a letter at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
moralness and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com The
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Joe McCormick
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