March 20, 2026 • 53 mins
They seem gross and bothersome at first, but once you get down to ground level and get to know snails, we’ll bet you’ll grow quite fond of them. They are living in a whole world we’re largely unaware of.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, everybody, if you've ever stepped on a snail and
didn't feel particularly bad about it, then you should probably
prepare for that to change. After listening to this episode,
it turns out that snails aren't just mucusy. They're a
precious member of your garden club too. So go find
a snail, share an earbud with them so you can
listen to this episode together.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hey, and welcome to the Slowcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. We're just inching along, doing
things our own way, our own speed, our own time,
leaving a trail of mucus behind us as we do.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Wow, inch and along point five per second.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, it's like that one guy said life is a highway.
I want to write it all night long, covering only
an inch.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Was that the parenthetical of that title?
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah? It was. It was you had to read between
the lines, Yeah, exactly, what a great song?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Or play it backwards? That song you think is great?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, I do. I do. If you take away all
the it's actually a great song. It's very upbeaaten enthusiastic
and very this is a good song.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Who was that?
Speaker 1 (01:36):
I I don't remember. I think that might have been
his only song. Although now I've said that, I'm sure
he's a huge sensation in Canada or something, and now
everybody's gonna be mad at us.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, that happens a lot.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
We'll find out. But anyway, whoever you are out there,
who made that song? For listening, Breton cap off to you.
That's right, Chuck, I picked this one.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
He's Canadian.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I knew it, dude, I knows that always happened. I
don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
What's his name, Tom Cochrane.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I wanted to say Tom, but I wanted to say
Tom brokecall and I was like, I'm not even going
to bring that up.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
And you know what, he's in the Canadian Music Hall
of Fame.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Oh right, So so much for that.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Okay at any rate, Hats off Tom Cochrane, I think,
is what I was trying to say.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Right, m hm.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
So we're doing an episode on Snails, which I'm kind
of psyched about. Our new good friend Allison helped us
with this one. I believe this is our second one
and she's doing great.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah, was this a listener recommendation.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
No, this was a Josh recommendation.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Okay, I didn't know if this was. You know, we
did some stuff recently with kids in the classroom, like
little virtual appearance appearances for our book stuff kids should know, huh.
And I know we got a lot of ideas and
just for some reason, I thought snails might have been
one of those.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Not a single one of those came up with the
idea of snails. It was really sad.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Kids these days and don't even know what snails are.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Snails that was was my pick, and I'm not sure
where it came from. I think I just pulled it
out of my head, but I'm glad I did, because
this is one of those things where, I mean, snails
are everywhere. Everyone knows what a snail is, like, it's
just a part of living on earth, you know about snails.
And yet what Alison turned up and I wasn't aware
(03:26):
of when I selected this, there's actually a bit of
a dearth of information academic information on snails specifically, and
that a lot of what we think we know about
them is actually just like old yarns that gardeners have
come up with over the years. So I love topics
like that, And actually, from researching this, I've come to
(03:47):
actually really appreciate snails like I Actually I kind of
think they're cute now, just from watching them in some videos.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Well, I looked up a picture of the h and
we'll talk about these in a little more till later,
but that giant African snail, and there was one picture
of a woman holding one of these things. Yeah, and
I swear it looked like a bunny rabbit with a
turtle shell.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Weird. I've not seen that picture.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
It looked like a bunny. I mean, it's a snail, clearly,
it didn't look that much like a bunny, right or
was it like what in the world?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Maybe it was eating a bunny? Is that what it was?
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I don't think so. But you were right, Allison was
keen to point out that malacology, which is someone who
studies molluscs, it's just I guess there's just not a
ton of those people out there, So there just tend
to be more people studying, you know, furier, cuter things
than snails.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I guess, right, exactly. And even if you do have
a lot of malacologists, they're studying mollusks and snails just
make a part of one class of a larger phylum
of mollusca. They're part of gastropoe And it's not just
snails in Gastropoda. We're talking slugs, sea slugs, conks, whelks, limpets. Basically,
(05:10):
all snail like creatures are in the Gastropoda class.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
So they're gastropodes.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, or gastropods.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Okay, I didn't know how that was pronounced, So.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
It's gotta be gastropod, right, I.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Mean, I think it's gastropod, but would it be gastropoda?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
No?
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Here is it one of those weird things that just
flips when you shorten it.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
It's that second thing. Okay, great, so I said, Also, Chuck,
just living on Earth, you're aware of snails, and there's
a reason for that. They've been around for a really,
really long time. They are everywhere, and you can even
if you're walking around Antarctica and you look down on
(05:50):
the ground, you might see a snail waving up to
you wearing a parka.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah. And even if you know, snails, as we will
find out, love moisture, even if you're in the desert,
even if you're in Arizona. Living there in Phoenix, you
might see a snail. Yeah, because there's still random water
here and there.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah. Plus also some of them have evolved to like
really hang on to their water better than other times,
so they can survive in the desert. It's just nuts.
They're everywhere. As a matter of fact, they think that
they there's about one hundred and fifty thousand gastropod species
in total, remember that includes slugs and all that stuff,
(06:31):
But they think the snail species are between thirty thousand
and thirty five thousand. And I mean, you know, we
think of snails as typically like the little garden snail,
maybe the s car ghost snail. I think that's the
Roman snail if I'm not mistaken. But there are all
sorts of snails. You mentioned the giant African land snail.
(06:54):
Those things get I saw that they get to be
about the size of a human fists or bigger. That's
a big snail. But on the other end, there's another
type of snail that they recently discovered and I think
Vietnam and Cambodia on the walls of caves and they
can fit inside like a grain of sand. They're that small.
But if you look at them under a microscope, they
are very clearly snails.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, I saw about five hundred native species to North America,
and we're generally going to be talking about, you know,
sort of your average land snail, but there are snails
that live exclusively in the water under the sea. It
would you know, there's just no way we could talk
about all the snails. So we're going to mainly concentrate
(07:36):
on the kind that leave that mucasi trail on the.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Sidewalk, right, Like, we could probably get through thirty four
thousand species today, but definitely not thirty five.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Thousand, that's right, So we're not getting dry.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay. So the other thing that's kind of like a
bummer about snail species is that as long as we've
been scientifically paying attention to snails, we've recorded more than
four hundred extinctions of snail species. And there's an Atlantic
short documentary I think it's like twelve minutes long. I
(08:12):
think it's called Goodbye Snails, and it's set in Hawaii
where they're experiencing this crazy mass extinction of their native
snail species that exist nowhere else in the world. And
it's a really kind of a tense little documentary. But
the people who are trying to rescue these snail species
(08:33):
and prevent them from extinction are really doing some amazing
work over there.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, there's about a thousand of them that are land
snails alone that are endangered right now. So that's a
lot of species to be in trouble. So that's no
good because as we will see, they can there can
be invasive snails, and they can do some harm to
the garden, but they also do a lot of great
things for your garden and for the world.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, leave the snails alone.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
You ever read them?
Speaker 1 (09:03):
I have, like once or twice. I'm not crazy about them, No,
they're not. I'm not an S Cargo fan. I'm a
fan of that S Cargo joke though.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Right, which is a look at that S cargo?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Is that what it was? What a snail painted an
ass on the side of his car?
Speaker 2 (09:20):
That's right. That's a great elementary school kid joke.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yep, that's wonderful. I was.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Trying to remember if I've ever I feel like I
might have tried it one time, many many many years ago,
because I do remember seeing snails floating in a buttery
solution on a plate and I think that was a
little tiny tong Yeah, that's involved, But I really had
(09:48):
a very very faint memory. So if I did try it,
I don't know under what circumstance it was, but it
was a long time ago, and it's it's not something
i'd really be into now.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So you've been have like a specialized plate for serving them,
and it basically doubles is like a doubled eggs serving
plate too. It's like, you know, got a bunch of
depressions in it that the snails sit in.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Right, I'd rather have a double legg You can also
eat snail eggs. They call it white caviar. Oh yeah, yeah,
it's a thing. There's a I think it's like one
hundred and thirty bucks for about one point seventy five ounces.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Wow. Wow, well that's a lot of snail eggs now
that I think about it.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, it seems like it. I mean, it looks like
it comes a little tin like caviar. But although I
do love caviar, now, I don't think I would try
snail caviar.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Okay, okay, I'll accept that answer.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
And I know I talked about a newish to caviar
just the past couple of years. So was it something
I ever had until semi recently, But.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Now you have it at dinner every night.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Just you've heard an avocado toast every morning. I just
have caviar toastut all over the biggest peace of sour
dough I can.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
With gold flakes on top.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
All right, Should we talk about the body of a snail?
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, I feel like we kind of have to because
there's a lot of misconceptions people have about snails, including me,
as far as their body goes.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, I mean we can talk about their shell for
a little bit. They have that. Well, we'll talk about
the shell kind of through out. It's obviously a protective device.
Snail can pull themselves back into that shell, and they
can actually put a little I think it's called an epigram,
(11:37):
and that is like a it's like a front door. Basically,
it's a temporary front door that they can put on
the whole of that shell. So if you ever pick
up a snail shell and it's covered with something, that
is a temporary front door that a snail uses to
keep people like you from poking around into that snail shell.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Yeah, and I saw that some of them have denticles
on their life like sharp kind of tooth like projections,
so that if a predator tries to come in there
after them, they'll get all torn up. Oh. On the epigram, yeah,
it's like those reverse tire damage things that like a
car rental parking lot. It's like that.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
From what I understand, that's pretty cool. And it also
keeps some moist because what a snail does not want
to do is dry out, because once again, a snail
is basically a slug with a helmet on.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Right, So I'd like to talk a little bit about
the misconceptions of how the snail body is arranged, if
we can.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Inside that shell is the actual body of the snail.
What we see as the head in the tail is
actually the head, true. But what looks like the tail
is actually like the heel of its foot. That's what
it's moving around on. Is its foot, right, it's single
foot exactly, and so above on top of that is
(13:00):
the whole body and all that is encased in the shell.
And what's weird is there's one opening that the what'd
you say covers the opening.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
The I think it's called an epigram. Okay, I'm sorry,
I've been saying epigram, epiphram, epifray, diaphram.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Okay, gotcha. So what the epifram covers is called the aperture.
And on land snails, there's one aperture. There's one way in,
one way out. And because all of their body is
tucked up in the shell, they still got to poop,
they've still got to breathe, they still have to do
all the stuff that requires the outside atmosphere. And so
(13:36):
what they've done is they've figured out how to double
their bodies around so that their head and their tail,
including their anus, are basically right next to one another
at the aperture at the opening of their shell.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, kind of like on top of their head. And
this is something called torsion, which means to twist. You know,
if you've heard of something, you've heard of torsion before. Probably.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, Chubby Checker was going to call his dance the torsion,
and he's like, this doesn't have the right ring. Let's
do the torsion, right, A traveler from the future came
back in time and told him, no, we should call
this the twist. Rocked out the high school dance, and
that was history.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
That's pretty good. You did you think of that one beforehand?
Speaker 1 (14:19):
No? No, okay, no I didn't. I've just gotten that
good this late in the year.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
I love it. So. Yeah, that body basically doubles back
one hundred and eighty degrees on top of itself. And
there's a lot of debate. I mean, should we get
into that, like the great torsion debate.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Yeah, we can at least touch on it. Sure, it's
almost impenetrable if you're not a malacologist.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, I would say so. So as far as when
torsion emerged, they're not exactly sure because you can't tell
from like a fossil whether or not a you know,
you can find a fossil of a shell, but the
torsion is happening within the shell, so you can't really
tell if it's been torsioned. Is that even a verb?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I don't know, torted, I was gonna say torted. I
didn't look it up, though, So I think tort it's right,
let's say torted.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, I think it's torted. So you can't really tell
if it's been torted by looking at a fossil. And
so there's just been a lot of debate, like, obviously
this happened for a reason. No one knows exactly what
that was. And like you mentioned at the beginning, some
of the sort of old farmer's tails. One of those
is you might hear some gardening people say, oh, well,
(15:35):
actually they're asymmetry inside that shell provides balance, and that's
just not true.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
No, No, that's definitely not There's also one that back
in the day when they were all marine animals, because
land snails evolve from marine aquatic snails, that it was
a way to keep their hind quarters, their tails, all
that stuff from being bitten by a predator. Probably it
(16:03):
does make sense, it's probably not it what the two
biggest competing hypothesis are the rotation hypothesis and the asymmetrical hypothesis.
And the rotational hypothesis the one that's been around since
like nineteen twenty nine, and it basically says that at
some point in the past, the the snail, some snail
(16:26):
mutant came along and twisted around during its development and
it became naturally selected because it was advantageous because it
allowed the snail to retract its head faster, whereas before
it would have had to retract the tail and then
the head. Now it can retract the head because it's
all it had to retract.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, but that was just like a spontaneous thing, right, That's.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
What the that's what they think. But it's just such
a bizarre thing to have happen, especially in a single mutation,
because again, what we're talking about is during the larval
development an body, it count it moves counterclockwise to one
hundred and eighty degrees, and so its circulatory and nervous
system forms a figure eight inside the shell. It's not
(17:11):
all just packed in there straight. It's all over the place.
And because of that weird torsion thing, the entire right
side of its anatomy, including its organs, are just not there.
It's all left side organ stuff. It all just got
moved over toward the inside of the shell because the
right side is pressed up against the shell itself, and
it's all because of torsion. And they just cannot figure
(17:33):
out why that would have happened in the past. And
clearly it could have happened as a as a like
a mutation that obviously did, but why would it have
been naturally selected for for hundreds of millions of years,
which strongly implies that it was like an advantageous mutation.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, I would think so, right, Yeah, so that's.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Kind of like this debate that's going on that that is,
I mean, you really have to understand snail at tom
me and evolutionary history to go much further in understanding
that debate. That's pretty much what I could glean from
the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah, and I would say hesitate even getting into that debate.
If you've had a couple of drinks at the bar
and you're feeling a little squarely and you want to
dive into this hot conversation.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, I would staer clear, just take a.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Break and have another drink and just relax.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah, or maybe it's time for you to go home.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Right, yeah, get a car to take you home, or
walk or whatever.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Yeah. So that's very careful. Snails tort and we're not
sure exactly why, but what we do know the upshot
of it is that their body is double back on
itself and there their anus and their head are essentially
right next to each other.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yes, exactly. They also have a mouth and inside that
mouth is something called a radula. It's a it has
teeth on it, and it's like a it's kind of
like a tongue, and they have You know, if you
look at a snail and they turn those two little
tentacles to look back at you, that's because they have
eyes mounted on either one or two pairs of tentacles,
(19:08):
and they can look at you. They can't hear you.
They don't have ears. From what I saw, snails are
basically deaf. But they can see you.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
They can see you, and depending on the species, there's
different types of eyes. Some have very simple eyes where
they can detect changes in light and dark or maybe
maybe movement. But there's some kinds I think that have
the ability to see you, to focus on you. And
because they're on the ends of those stalks, they can
(19:39):
retract the eyes themselves in the stalk, and then the
stalk into the head, and then the head into the shell,
and then when they want to see if danger's gone,
they can peak one of those stalks out from the shell.
Look around. Isn't that cool?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
That's pretty cool? Yeah, I love it. And there's also
the mantle, and the mantle will come up quite a bit,
and the best I could figures that may mantle is
that area around the rim of the shell that connects
the foot in the head to the shell itself, right.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah, and it's also whatever holds all of our organs
and guts in place. That membrane is very analogous to
the mantle tissue of the snail because it holds all
the organs in place, but it also does something really important.
It secretes all of the stuff that eventually is built
into the shell itself.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
So are we at the shell partner?
Speaker 2 (20:31):
You think you know what? This is a good We're
twenty minutes in. I think we should take a break, yeah,
because that shell formation is quite a cliffhanger. Okay, and
we'll be right back after this, all right, So we
(21:07):
promised to talk to you a little bit about the shell.
A snail shell is beautiful. You should never ever ever
smash a snail shell or a snail because that's animal
cruelty and it's a terrible thing to do, so just
don't do it. Right, But it is basically there's a
little bit of protein in there, but it's mainly something
(21:28):
called calcium carbonate, and it is, like you said earlier,
secreted by that mantle tissue, and it builds up over time.
If you look at sort of the center part of
that shell. That's the oldest part of the shell. You
can tell a snail's age by how big that shell is.
And that's also the hardest part of the shell because
it's been around longer. So they just keep adding material
(21:51):
along that outer edge little by little as it expands outward.
And that is why a like the outer edge of
a snail shell will be much more you know, sort
of breakable than the inside harder part.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
That makes sense. So the oldest part is the closest
to the to the center.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, apparently.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Also I didn't realize this. They're born with a tiny
shell already attached. They just grow it over time by secrete.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Starter starter shell exactly and then cut.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah, they're born like little tiny baby snails like that preformationism,
uh theory from our things we used to believe before
the Scientific Method episode.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
So I also said, Chuck, the mantle holds the mantle
tissue holds all the the important guts and stuff like
that in place. And the way that snails breathe is
through the mantle cavity. They have blood vessels in there,
but they breathe using kind of like a primitive. I
don't want to say long. I think that's kind of
(22:51):
a stretch. But basically they have an opening that.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
It's called a lung. I've seen it called the lung
in diagrams.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Okay, so I've also seen it called a new numastome,
and it's essentially a breathing port that they can open
and close using their muscles that takes in air and
exhales air. But it's pretty neat and it's right there
next to their head, right there at the aperture where
everything else that needs to be outside is.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah, and they can if you're talking about sea snails,
Like I said, we're not going to get two into them,
but they can have similar body parts in terms of breathing,
or they can also have gills kind of upfront as well.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah. So one of the things snails are most famous
for is there mucus right Yeah, that is apparently secreted
by the foot, And as the foot moves along, it's
just a series of muscles that just kind of propel
as they ripple, propel the snail along, but they lay
down a trail of mucus that does a lot of
(23:49):
different things. For one, it allows the snail to do
some Spider man esque moves, like just crawl right up
the side of a building because it's very strong.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
It's glue like, Yeah, but it can be it's funny
because it can be glue like or act as a
lubricant exactly, which is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Yeah. So yeah, it also separates the snail from the
rest of the world that it's running over. Yeah, you know,
it's strong like glue, but it also allows the snail
to move smoothly, and it also protects the snail's body
from sharp things that it might be crawling over slowly
crawling over. And it also keeps the moisture locked inside
(24:31):
so much so that snail mucin, as we'll see, has
been used for millennia as like kind of a skin thing.
If you have very dry skin and you can get
your hands on snail mucan or mucous, it will cure
your dry skin.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Yeah, I mean that's what keeps the I mean that
and other things is what keeps that snail moist. So
if it's keeping the snail alive, then imagine what it
can do for your crow's feet exactly. I only think
we said what was actually made of. It's enzymes, peptides, proteins,
trace minerals, and it's it's pretty remarkable stuff. It's you know,
(25:11):
the tailtale sign is when you see that stuff on
the sidewalk, and just the term snail trail itself, that
sort of snotty, glistening, shiny snail trail is you know,
it's become sort of part of the lexicon to you know,
as a stand in for other things at times.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
So yeah, for sure. So one of the other things
that the snail trail, the mucous trail does is it says, hey, sailor,
come come this way, right, because it's one way that
snails find one another to mate, which is surprising that
they mate because they're hermaphroditic. They all snails, or most
(25:48):
species of land snails are equipped with both male and
female sex organs. But and when they come together to mate,
it's there's no telling who's who or who's doing what,
because in the end both of them often come away
with fertilized eggs.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, I mean, to me, this section is the most
remarkable stuff about snails. How they reproduce is just amazing.
They are hermaphroditic because and it just makes sense, if
you're moving point five inches per second, you would die
out as a species if you if like a male
(26:25):
had to search for a female or the other way around.
So they basically just double their chances of finding somebody
within the you know, ten feet or so that they're
they're wandering around. I mean they move more than that
within a lifetime, obviously, but you know, if it's that
time of year, which is what.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Like autumn, sure, autumn and spring.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Autumn and spring, they're gonna wander around, they're gonna find
another snail. They're gonna dance around each other, and that
just means very slowly circle each other for I saw
four to six hours. I saw. The whole thing can
take up to twelve hours. It's a very obviously as
you would imagine, a very slow process.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
It is slow, but it's really involved, like they are
really into it. While they're they're going at.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
It, yeah, I mean they're they're and this is before
they're going at it. This is when they're just sort
of like sizing each other up. They're getting their steam,
they're touching tentacles, they're biting each other's lips. Things are
getting really pretty hot and heavy in there. And then
they have something that is amazing, and I don't know
if any other animal that has something like this. They
(27:37):
have something called a love what they call a love dart.
A love dart only forms after the first mating, so
you have to have at least a little bit of
sexual experience to even form a love dart. Sure, they
take about a week to form, and you don't always
have to have one to mate, because if you've used
up your love dart and then you know within the
(27:59):
week you want to go at it again, you can
still do that. It's not necessary for reproduction, but it
helps in reproduction. They form in the dart sack and
is stored in a dart sack, and if you look
at it, it's a little It is a little dart.
It's got this little sharp harpoon like tip and they actually,
it says they shoot it, but it doesn't like fly
(28:22):
through the air. It's more like a they stab one
another with it.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Oh, I imagine it like ew and then just sailing
a couple feet and then spraying.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
That would be great. It's more like it's stabbing. But
apparently it's very imprecise. This hydraulic pressure builds up as
they circle and bite each other's lips and then they
shoot this thing out at each other and it can
I think about a third of the time it doesn't
even do it it's intended to do, which we'll get
to in a sect, but it can pierce organs. It
can go all the way through the head and out
(28:52):
the other side. So it's really crazy. It's a weird adaptation.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah, no, it's super weird. And the I think what's
most weird about it to me is there's other animals
that do that to deliver sperm. That's not what the
snails are doing. These love darts deliver other hormones that
help protect the sperm as it makes its way to
the eggs to fertilize. It's like a really clumsy, superfluous
(29:21):
extra step that, like you said, doesn't even like they
miss a lot of the time. They still manage to
fertilize eggs. It's just a very strange thing that they do.
But it's part of this really long, really slimy courtship mating,
you know, process that they get involved in. And then
the sex itself is like just one rubs its foot
(29:44):
against the other foot and there you go.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Right and they say who's pregnant which, and they go,
I don't know, Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Both of them, Yeah, both of us.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Actually can it be both?
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, that both both can walk
away with fertilized eggs after this.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, and they can lay. I think they can hatch
up to four hundred and fifty eggs per year, and
that doesn't take very long. Actually, right in the gestation
period it can be like really short.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Right for some species, especially in captivity, it can be
twenty four hours. Others it seems like the outside is
four weeks, and usually in the while, it's like two
to four weeks for gestation.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, and once those little guys are born, they may
immediately start eating the rest of the eggs as their
first meal.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Yeah. It's kind of a bummer, especially because leading up
to it, it's so cute, this little tiny snail with
its little tiny shells inside its egg, and it starts
tapping its way out until it cracks through the egg.
And then yeah, it gruesomely eats its siblings very quickly.
Sometimes it'll eat smaller siblings that have already hatched, not
just the eggs. What I didn't realize though, is that
(30:51):
some and that's actually not all snail species. That's ones
that will eat eggs, but for the most part they'll
eat just vegetation.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
The snail parent will often stay nearby to provide protection
for the young snail hatchlings for a little.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
While they hang out for a while, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I did not realize though, I thought it was pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, they can. They can hang out for up to
three months together while the parents are kind of protecting them.
And like you said, they're born with that little baby
shell and just gets bigger and bigger. They did we
talk about how long they can live.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
No, we didn't. It's pretty spectacular.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Yeah, I mean in the wild they can live up
to five years, which that shocked me quite frankly.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah. Really, I feel bad for all the snails you've
accidentally stepped on after a rainy evening.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
You hope at least they were old.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah, exactly, like they had their time.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, so five years is a pretty long time in
the wild. I think in captivity they can live up
to twenty five years, which is astounding.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yeah. There's a really great little short documentary called The
Strange and Wonderful War Old of the Snail Wrangler. It's
on YouTube and it's about this woman who takes photos
of her snail friends in like little miniature settings, human settings.
It's really cute, and she talks about one of her
snail companions that she's been with for like ten years.
(32:17):
And it's just, I mean, when you think of it
like that, like snails are just so they're off doing
their own thing. They live in a world far different
from ours, even though we share the same geography. It's
just a different world. So when you cross paths with one,
you're like, hey, alien, and they're probably like, hey, giant alien.
And that's it. The idea that they're there in that
(32:38):
same patch as long as you are. In some cases,
when you're like if you live at a house for
ten years, a snail might have lived there just as
long as you did for the same time, Like you
shared that with them that whole time. It's they're not
just this anonymous, generic animals running around there. They I mean,
anything that lives that long, there's just something substantial to
(33:00):
it than you would think initially.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Are you saying snail has the soul?
Speaker 1 (33:07):
I think it's pretty clear.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yes, all right, so snails are doing their things. I
love this account that Alison found that was a scientist
from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History that said snails
are leaky bags of water that survive on dry land.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
And it almost sounds like they're saying like they happen
to survive, because it doesn't seem like a snail was
really made for that environment. But they survive anyway because
snails really need to stay moist, like a snail drying out,
just like a slug, means certain death. So even though
there are snails in the desert, you're mainly going to
(33:46):
find snails in more moist areas. We're gonna say that
word quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I apologize, I was gonna say, unlike humans, moist is
a snail's favorite word. It really is.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
They do live on the ground, mainly if they're a
trust real snails, but they can live in trees, but
they really like it down there on the ground in
that sort of moist outer layer of decaying plant matter.
They're pretty active at night because things can get wetter overnight,
as we know, like when you wake up with like
(34:17):
morning dew and stuff like that. So they're just down
there on the ground sometimes eating meat and other snails
and other eggs. But generally what they're doing is eating
and munching down on that either decaying plant matter, or
if you have a garden, they will also munch down
on your nice new fresh plants.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah, and as we'll see that, they run a foul
of gardeners for that reason. But just hold your horse
as gardeners, put your rubber mallets away for a second
until we get to that part and talk you out
of it. But in that leaf litter layer, they do
a lot of really important stuff they are in charge of,
(34:56):
like recycling plant matter, decay stuff. They love decaying everything
in addition to live plants to they love dead plants.
And when they're doing that, they're like recycling nutrients. They
eat that stuff, they break it down and they poop
it out, and that means it's bioavailable in the soil
for plants to use, for other animals to come along
(35:18):
and like that, like to lick the dirt, that kind
of thing. They also are really important in the food
web because calcium is not really easy necessarily to come
by in food, at least if you're like a small
like an invertbrate or a mammal or something like that.
If you eat a snail shell, you get a burst
(35:39):
of calcium, so that snailshell is really important. And then
they're also chok full of protein themselves. So they're like
a really important part of any food web in the
ecosystem that they live in.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah, they're also moving stuff around down there. I mean,
plant matter in that outer layer that just sits and
sits isn't great. But if they're if you've got thousands
of snails moving around through it, it's gonna help drainage out.
It's going to help keep distributing those nutrients if there's
you know, it can help move dirt and clay even important.
(36:13):
All that stuff is great. And they can actually help
pollinate too. Some of them are nighttime pollinators. They get
in there with that plant nectar, they eat that stuff
and then they poop that out as well.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, pretty crazy. I had no idea that they were pollinators.
It just makes them even more important, you know what
I mean totally. So I think, Chuck, we take a
break and then we come back and talk about why
you should leave the snails alone. How about that.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
So one thing that we said earlier, Chuck, was that
snails run a foul of gardeners, and the reason why
is because they will, I mean, they will eat a
lot of plants. The Burgundy snail also known as the
Roman snail, the one that's mostly used for s cargo
these days. They weigh twenty gramsish as an adult, but
(37:26):
they'll eat six grams of plant matter in a day. Yeah,
you have a bunch of burgundy snails running around your garden.
They're gonna eat your hostas, they're gonna eat your seedlings.
They're going to tick you off. And so there's a
lot of a lot of animosity that gardeners have towards
snails and slugs too, and so they people have been
(37:47):
trying things to get rid of snails for a very
long time. The problem is number one, you don't actually
want to get rid of snails, especially native snails or
common garden snails. And number two, the meta that's typically
used are chemical and they can harm other life as well. Yeah,
so there's you basically want to leave the snails alone
(38:07):
as much as possible.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah. There is some information here that Allison got from
the Royal Horticultural Society in Britain, and they say, you know,
don't use chemical pesticides please, Like, if you want to
get rid of your snails, you can try and do
so naturally by introducing predators. I guess you know, you
(38:31):
throw a bunch of garden beetles out there and see
what happens. Just say, whoever whoever walks out of here
alive is, you know, deserves to live. It's like the
Thunderdome exactly. To enter one leaves.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
As a matter of fact, if you're bored, just go
ahead and build a small scale replica up the thunderdome
and put the snail in the beetle in you.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
That's right, But then you have to act like Tina
Turner and use that voice when he raggedy snail. That's
what you would have to call it.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
That was a great impression, by the way, Chuck, thank you.
In addition to putting them in a death match against beetles,
you can go pick them out yourself. If you go
out at night with the flashlight, you can pick pick
up plenty of snails.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
The thing is you put them in your neighbor's guard.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, exactly, Especially if they're a jerk hosta grower, they
will really drive them crazy. Now what you want to
do is put them on your compost pile, because again,
they like decaying stuff and they're really useful, so they'll
be pretty happy there. And you can also trap them
by carving out like melons or grapefruit or something like that,
and they'll be attracted to that, and it's just basically
(39:41):
acts as a trap. You just throw it back on
your compost pile the next day and there you go.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
All right.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Some people do, say you some people still use pesticides
if you're if you're organic, use feric phosphate, which interrupts
their abilit to digest so they die of starvation in
a few days. There's another one called metaldehyde that is
hardcore stuff. It desiccates them. They end up dehydrating to death,
(40:13):
and it's banned in the EU because they consider it
unacceptably harmful to birds and mammals. Of course, here in
the US you can use it as much as you like.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Of course you can.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
And they use it for the giant African land snail
in particular, because again metaldehyde is hardcore stuff, and it
turns out that the giant African land snail is hardcore snail.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, it's a hard core snail obviously would be an
invasive species here in North America. These are the big ones,
the one that look like a bunny. I thought they
can be eight inches long. They eat more than five
hundred species of plant. They will eat everything in their paths,
including in Florida. They're a real problem in Florida. Apparently
(40:58):
they will eat the stucco off your house to get
more calcium, and they can pass disease along to people
and animals. Youah, rat lungworm, Yeah, meningitis. I've seen that there.
They can carry a host of parasites, or they can
host a host of parasites, some of which will is
(41:19):
you know, good for the snail because it keeps animals
from eating them, So it's like a defense mechanism, right,
But that can be harmful to people at times as well.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah, yeah, you don't want rat long worm. Like you said,
it can create meningitis in humans. So it's best to
not really handle snails with your bare hands, and especially
don't eat the snail alive from your garden. That's a
really bad idea.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Yeah, but people actually collect and I'm not sure if
that's how they got here, but people collect these, you know,
as an illegal pet, these giant African land snails.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
That's my understanding that they were imported as illegal pets,
at least to south in the world.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Are people doing.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
I don't know, but they also have been have shown
up in some other places, including Hawaii and Polynesia, and
somehow they got from Florida to these places, probably through
the illegal pet trade. And so, in just typical human
fashion in the fifties, people said, well, wait, there's this
(42:22):
snail called a rosy wolf snail, and it's a predator.
It's a little literal snail predator. It's just important bunch
of them to take care of this giant African land
snail because I'm sure nothing will possibly go wrong because
of this plan. It's foolproof. And that's what they did,
and as a result, Hawaii has lost almost all of
its native snail species in the wild because the rosy
(42:45):
wolf snail was like, I'd just rather eat these other
kinds of snails than leave the giant African snail alone.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah, these things are pretty creepy, though. I imagine there's got
to be some kind of nat geo video of the
wolf snail, like, you know, following its prey because for
a snail, they're moving pretty fast. Yeah, when they're tracking something,
they go double to triple their normal speed. They will
(43:12):
go up a tree after something. They will go underwater
after something for a little while until they need to
come up. It seems like they're just tenacious little fellas
and they will go after something until they catch it.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Yeah, and they like to swallow other snails whole, including
their shell.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
And there's a malacologist named Harry g Lee who dissected
a rosy wolf snail and found thirteen other snails shells
in its gut.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, that's a lot, a lot. It's like in a
Louisiana state license plate.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
Yeah exactly. So, Yeah, you don't want these things on
your beautiful, pristine island. And once you bring them in,
they're going to cause all sorts of problems. And that's
what that Goodbye Snail video was about. It's definitely worth watching.
But the rosy wolf snail is definitely considered invasive. And
what I didn't know, Chuck, is the common garden snail,
the one we're so familiar with, is considered invasive in
(44:09):
the United States. Corn new espresso, that is the common
garden snail, and it was originally important because it was
the one that used to be es cargo, and some
of them escaped from farms and set up shop in
the wild. And now it's called the common garden snail
because it became so prolific.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah, and they don't know when people started eating es cargo.
And I think es cargo is is the French name
for that edible snail. And also doubles is the name
of the dish.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I think you're right, like French things both.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Yeah, but you know, people like this stuff. It was always,
you know, growing up, you always heard about es cargo
was like this, you know, sort of as a as
a kid, the first fancy, weird food you'd heard of.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
Probably do the wealthy have no bounds kind of.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Exactly. And then you know, we've got all signs. Should
we finish up with just a bunch of kind of
cool factoids, Yeah, for sure. Well. Jewelry. Snail shells have
always or have long been used as jewelry for humans,
as some of the oldest known human jewelry. They found
the stuff like necklaces and stuff made of sea snail
(45:27):
shells that date back like at least one hundred and
twenty thousand years.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
That's nuts man.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, what else?
Speaker 1 (45:33):
The author Patricia high Smith, who was a very interesting
person in her own right. She wrote The Strangers on
a Train and the Talented Mister Ripley novels. She was
a snail pal like the snail wrangler in that video
that I talked about, And like the snail wrangler in
that video that I talked about, she would go out
in public with her snails as companions. There's a story
(45:55):
of Patricia Highsmith at a party who was revealed to
have dozens of snails in her purse who she brought
so she'd have someone to talk to her snail friends.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
Yeah, how about that?
Speaker 1 (46:06):
How about that? That's what snail people do? Is that
kind of thing?
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah? Yeah. This is really interesting is they've been studying
how snails might help us figure out Alzheimer's disease. From
what I found is they've you know, we've talked about
Alzheimer's before, which is when you have these amyloid plaque
build up or plaques I guess that build up on
the brain tissue, and they don't exactly know how it
(46:32):
causes memory loss, but this is what they're trying to
figure out what the snails. These plaques are formed from
a protein called amyloid beta, which we've talked about, or
a beta, and they have taken a beta and put
it on otherwise very healthy pond snails. I have no
idea why they chose, like why they thought the pond
snail was a good candidate to begin with.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Terrible lobbying group.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
Maybe that's what it is. But they put this a
beta on these healthy ponds snails and within twenty four
hours they show evidence that they have harmed their memory basically,
but the finding is that they haven't found any damage
to the brain tissue, like no cell loss, no brain
tissue damage at all. So basically what they have sort
(47:18):
of you know the result of all that is that
ABTA by itself can trigger the memory loss and it's
not from like damage to the brain or like a deterioration.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Of the brain or the platte build up, right.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah, exactly. They think it's like a specific pathway for
memory that's being damaged and the brain itself. Thank you
pond snails, I know it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
I also saw it goes the other way too, that
the common garden snails mucus has been found to be
bioactive as an anti inflammatory, antioxidant and anti apoptic, which
means it prevents cell death. Oh wow, so they think
that they are figuring out how to turn that into
a drug to treat Alzheimer's. So snails are just coming
(48:01):
at us with the one two punch to battle Alzheimer's disease.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Yeah, God blessed love it.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Speaking of God bless them, if you're subscribe to the
West African Yoruba religion, you would say God bless the
snail because they're associated with Obatala, the sky Father, as
well as the Arisha's collective deities, to whom the land snail,
the giant African land snail in particular, is sacred.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
I gotta read this last thing. This is the only
last thing I got. Okay, this Nigerian snail recipe. Yeah,
I'm not in to eat snails. They call this congo meat.
It's got red pepper, habnio's okay, garlic, onion, and then
a season with cayenne and ground crayfish.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
Yeah, you lost me at Hobin Euro But it does
sound extremely interesting. I would try it. I'd just be like,
can you leave the hobbin Niro out.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Too hot, too hot, Yeah, too hot for the hot
top Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Too hot tv uh huh. So I've got one more thing, chuck,
let's hear it. There is a weird thing that started
popping up at the end of the thirteenth century in
northern France. If you look through illuminated manuscripts, meaning manuscripts
that have the doodles in the margins and all that,
like a map magazine, yeah, you will start to notice
(49:22):
there are pictures of nights battling giant snails.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Oh yeah, that's so interesting.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
And they It lasted for like one hundred or so years,
is like a trend. It actually came back again for
a little while in the fifteenth century, and no one
has any idea what they were trying to say. One
of the theories is that it is just hilarious that
it was Menu's like kind of comic relief. While you're
reading like this kind of heavy text or whatever, you
just look over and you're like, that's a night battling
(49:48):
a snail, right.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Other people say that the snails symbolize something like superhuman
strength because they carry their house on their back. I
kind of pooh poo that one I like this the
comic relief one.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
And people were just like, hey, this is funny. Look
at this. This night's fighting a snail.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Yeah, this will be good for a laugh, said the
medieval monk. Very interesting, I say so too. So if
you want to know more about snails, everybody, go forth
research them. You could do worse than watching the strange
and wonderful world of the Snail Wrangler. And goodbye snails.
And if you see a snail in your garden, and
especially if it's not doing anything to harm things, you
(50:24):
just tip your hat to it and say good day, snail.
You could be as much as five to ten years old.
That's right, Chuck said, that's right. This means it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (50:38):
Yeah, we're going to do a correction. I wish we
could get this one out sooner because we're going to
continue to get emails about the Great isotope ion. My
goodness issue, which I didn't know is an issue. This
was we had a lot of them. But this is
from Nick Lufty, PhD student at UC Irvine, and Nick
(51:01):
is getting a PhD in quantum chemistry.
Speaker 1 (51:05):
Oh wow, man, I want to hang out with you Nick.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
And Nick listens with his wife Dinah, Hey, Dinah, and said,
can't wait till we're in town for a show. But
if you're at Irvine, I mean Irvine. How far is
that from San Francisco. I mean it's in the state
of California. So Scott to just be like an hour
away exactly.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Yeah, everything in California is an hour away.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
Come see us. Hey, guys, wanted to offer a slight
correction about the periodic table. Don't hate me. When you
mentioned the different weighted averages being a result of different isotopes,
you mentioned that it is the loss or gain of
an electron that constitutes the different isotopes. This is actually incorrect.
What you've defined is an ion, not an isotope. It
(51:50):
is the varying number of neutrons that makes up the
different flavors of isotopes. This is the thing that makes
carbon dating possible. I love that episode. By the way.
Last thing, guys, mystry as a whole is a very
inaccessible branch of STEM. I hated it. I failed my
first che chemistry class in one day. Our professor was
out sick, and the chair of the chem department came
(52:11):
to sub in and she implored us to get a
PhD in chemistry. I said to myself, she must be nuts.
Here I am ten years later and I am clearly
the one who is nuts. The long and short of
this last bit is to never give up on science. Nice,
and that again is from Nick. I think it said lufty,
but it's actually lutfi.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Okay, like Chipotle chipolte. Yeah, that's right, Thanks a lot, Nick.
We'll call him nick L from now on. Yeah, that
was a great one. So everybody who wrote in to
let us know, we appreciate you for doing that because
we like to get things right and that was definitely
a slip up and it is something that we needed
to correct for sure. So good job Chuck picking that one.
Speaker 2 (52:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:56):
Well, if you want to get in touch with us
and let us know we got something wronger something right,
or tell someone about yourself or your dog or your
pet goat doesn't matter, you can send it via email
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, if you've ever stepped on a snail and
didn't feel particularly bad about it, then you should probably
prepare for that to change. After listening to this episode,
it turns out that snails aren't just mucusy. They're a
precious member of your garden club too. So go find
a snail, share an earbud with them so you can
listen to this episode together.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hey, and welcome to the Slowcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. We're just inching along, doing
things our own way, our own speed, our own time,
leaving a trail of mucus behind us as we do.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Wow, inch and along point five per second.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, it's like that one guy said life is a highway.
I want to write it all night long, covering only
an inch.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Was that the parenthetical of that title?
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah? It was. It was you had to read between
the lines, Yeah, exactly, what a great song?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Or play it backwards? That song you think is great?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah, I do. I do. If you take away all
the it's actually a great song. It's very upbeaaten enthusiastic
and very this is a good song.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Who was that?
Speaker 1 (01:36):
I I don't remember. I think that might have been
his only song. Although now I've said that, I'm sure
he's a huge sensation in Canada or something, and now
everybody's gonna be mad at us.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah, that happens a lot.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
We'll find out. But anyway, whoever you are out there,
who made that song? For listening, Breton cap off to you.
That's right, Chuck, I picked this one.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
He's Canadian.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I knew it, dude, I knows that always happened. I
don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
What's his name, Tom Cochrane.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I wanted to say Tom, but I wanted to say
Tom brokecall and I was like, I'm not even going
to bring that up.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
And you know what, he's in the Canadian Music Hall
of Fame.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Oh right, So so much for that.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Okay at any rate, Hats off Tom Cochrane, I think,
is what I was trying to say.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Right, m hm.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
So we're doing an episode on Snails, which I'm kind
of psyched about. Our new good friend Allison helped us
with this one. I believe this is our second one
and she's doing great.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah, was this a listener recommendation.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
No, this was a Josh recommendation.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Okay, I didn't know if this was. You know, we
did some stuff recently with kids in the classroom, like
little virtual appearance appearances for our book stuff kids should know, huh.
And I know we got a lot of ideas and
just for some reason, I thought snails might have been
one of those.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Not a single one of those came up with the
idea of snails. It was really sad.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Kids these days and don't even know what snails are.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Snails that was was my pick, and I'm not sure
where it came from. I think I just pulled it
out of my head, but I'm glad I did, because
this is one of those things where, I mean, snails
are everywhere. Everyone knows what a snail is, like, it's
just a part of living on earth, you know about snails.
And yet what Alison turned up and I wasn't aware
(03:26):
of when I selected this, there's actually a bit of
a dearth of information academic information on snails specifically, and
that a lot of what we think we know about
them is actually just like old yarns that gardeners have
come up with over the years. So I love topics
like that, And actually, from researching this, I've come to
(03:47):
actually really appreciate snails like I Actually I kind of
think they're cute now, just from watching them in some videos.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Well, I looked up a picture of the h and
we'll talk about these in a little more till later,
but that giant African snail, and there was one picture
of a woman holding one of these things. Yeah, and
I swear it looked like a bunny rabbit with a
turtle shell.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Weird. I've not seen that picture.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
It looked like a bunny. I mean, it's a snail, clearly,
it didn't look that much like a bunny, right or
was it like what in the world?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Maybe it was eating a bunny? Is that what it was?
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I don't think so. But you were right, Allison was
keen to point out that malacology, which is someone who
studies molluscs, it's just I guess there's just not a
ton of those people out there, So there just tend
to be more people studying, you know, furier, cuter things
than snails.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
I guess, right, exactly. And even if you do have
a lot of malacologists, they're studying mollusks and snails just
make a part of one class of a larger phylum
of mollusca. They're part of gastropoe And it's not just
snails in Gastropoda. We're talking slugs, sea slugs, conks, whelks, limpets. Basically,
(05:10):
all snail like creatures are in the Gastropoda class.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
So they're gastropodes.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, or gastropods.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Okay, I didn't know how that was pronounced, So.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
It's gotta be gastropod, right, I.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Mean, I think it's gastropod, but would it be gastropoda?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
No?
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Here is it one of those weird things that just
flips when you shorten it.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
It's that second thing. Okay, great, so I said, Also, Chuck,
just living on Earth, you're aware of snails, and there's
a reason for that. They've been around for a really,
really long time. They are everywhere, and you can even
if you're walking around Antarctica and you look down on
(05:50):
the ground, you might see a snail waving up to
you wearing a parka.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah. And even if you know, snails, as we will
find out, love moisture, even if you're in the desert,
even if you're in Arizona. Living there in Phoenix, you
might see a snail. Yeah, because there's still random water
here and there.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah. Plus also some of them have evolved to like
really hang on to their water better than other times,
so they can survive in the desert. It's just nuts.
They're everywhere. As a matter of fact, they think that
they there's about one hundred and fifty thousand gastropod species
in total, remember that includes slugs and all that stuff,
(06:31):
But they think the snail species are between thirty thousand
and thirty five thousand. And I mean, you know, we
think of snails as typically like the little garden snail,
maybe the s car ghost snail. I think that's the
Roman snail if I'm not mistaken. But there are all
sorts of snails. You mentioned the giant African land snail.
(06:54):
Those things get I saw that they get to be
about the size of a human fists or bigger. That's
a big snail. But on the other end, there's another
type of snail that they recently discovered and I think
Vietnam and Cambodia on the walls of caves and they
can fit inside like a grain of sand. They're that small.
But if you look at them under a microscope, they
are very clearly snails.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, I saw about five hundred native species to North America,
and we're generally going to be talking about, you know,
sort of your average land snail, but there are snails
that live exclusively in the water under the sea. It
would you know, there's just no way we could talk
about all the snails. So we're going to mainly concentrate
(07:36):
on the kind that leave that mucasi trail on the.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Sidewalk, right, Like, we could probably get through thirty four
thousand species today, but definitely not thirty five.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Thousand, that's right, So we're not getting dry.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Okay. So the other thing that's kind of like a
bummer about snail species is that as long as we've
been scientifically paying attention to snails, we've recorded more than
four hundred extinctions of snail species. And there's an Atlantic
short documentary I think it's like twelve minutes long. I
(08:12):
think it's called Goodbye Snails, and it's set in Hawaii
where they're experiencing this crazy mass extinction of their native
snail species that exist nowhere else in the world. And
it's a really kind of a tense little documentary. But
the people who are trying to rescue these snail species
(08:33):
and prevent them from extinction are really doing some amazing
work over there.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, there's about a thousand of them that are land
snails alone that are endangered right now. So that's a
lot of species to be in trouble. So that's no
good because as we will see, they can there can
be invasive snails, and they can do some harm to
the garden, but they also do a lot of great
things for your garden and for the world.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, leave the snails alone.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
You ever read them?
Speaker 1 (09:03):
I have, like once or twice. I'm not crazy about them, No,
they're not. I'm not an S Cargo fan. I'm a
fan of that S Cargo joke though.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Right, which is a look at that S cargo?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Is that what it was? What a snail painted an
ass on the side of his car?
Speaker 2 (09:20):
That's right. That's a great elementary school kid joke.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yep, that's wonderful. I was.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Trying to remember if I've ever I feel like I
might have tried it one time, many many many years ago,
because I do remember seeing snails floating in a buttery
solution on a plate and I think that was a
little tiny tong Yeah, that's involved, But I really had
(09:48):
a very very faint memory. So if I did try it,
I don't know under what circumstance it was, but it
was a long time ago, and it's it's not something
i'd really be into now.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So you've been have like a specialized plate for serving them,
and it basically doubles is like a doubled eggs serving
plate too. It's like, you know, got a bunch of
depressions in it that the snails sit in.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Right, I'd rather have a double legg You can also
eat snail eggs. They call it white caviar. Oh yeah, yeah,
it's a thing. There's a I think it's like one
hundred and thirty bucks for about one point seventy five ounces.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Wow. Wow, well that's a lot of snail eggs now
that I think about it.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, it seems like it. I mean, it looks like
it comes a little tin like caviar. But although I
do love caviar, now, I don't think I would try
snail caviar.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Okay, okay, I'll accept that answer.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
And I know I talked about a newish to caviar
just the past couple of years. So was it something
I ever had until semi recently, But.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Now you have it at dinner every night.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Just you've heard an avocado toast every morning. I just
have caviar toastut all over the biggest peace of sour
dough I can.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
With gold flakes on top.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
All right, Should we talk about the body of a snail?
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yeah, I feel like we kind of have to because
there's a lot of misconceptions people have about snails, including me,
as far as their body goes.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, I mean we can talk about their shell for
a little bit. They have that. Well, we'll talk about
the shell kind of through out. It's obviously a protective device.
Snail can pull themselves back into that shell, and they
can actually put a little I think it's called an epigram,
(11:37):
and that is like a it's like a front door. Basically,
it's a temporary front door that they can put on
the whole of that shell. So if you ever pick
up a snail shell and it's covered with something, that
is a temporary front door that a snail uses to
keep people like you from poking around into that snail shell.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Yeah, and I saw that some of them have denticles
on their life like sharp kind of tooth like projections,
so that if a predator tries to come in there
after them, they'll get all torn up. Oh. On the epigram, yeah,
it's like those reverse tire damage things that like a
car rental parking lot. It's like that.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
From what I understand, that's pretty cool. And it also
keeps some moist because what a snail does not want
to do is dry out, because once again, a snail
is basically a slug with a helmet on.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Right, So I'd like to talk a little bit about
the misconceptions of how the snail body is arranged, if
we can.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Inside that shell is the actual body of the snail.
What we see as the head in the tail is
actually the head, true. But what looks like the tail
is actually like the heel of its foot. That's what
it's moving around on. Is its foot, right, it's single
foot exactly, and so above on top of that is
(13:00):
the whole body and all that is encased in the shell.
And what's weird is there's one opening that the what'd
you say covers the opening.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
The I think it's called an epigram. Okay, I'm sorry,
I've been saying epigram, epiphram, epifray, diaphram.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Okay, gotcha. So what the epifram covers is called the aperture.
And on land snails, there's one aperture. There's one way in,
one way out. And because all of their body is
tucked up in the shell, they still got to poop,
they've still got to breathe, they still have to do
all the stuff that requires the outside atmosphere. And so
(13:36):
what they've done is they've figured out how to double
their bodies around so that their head and their tail,
including their anus, are basically right next to one another
at the aperture at the opening of their shell.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, kind of like on top of their head. And
this is something called torsion, which means to twist. You know,
if you've heard of something, you've heard of torsion before. Probably.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, Chubby Checker was going to call his dance the torsion,
and he's like, this doesn't have the right ring. Let's
do the torsion, right, A traveler from the future came
back in time and told him, no, we should call
this the twist. Rocked out the high school dance, and
that was history.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
That's pretty good. You did you think of that one beforehand?
Speaker 1 (14:19):
No? No, okay, no I didn't. I've just gotten that
good this late in the year.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
I love it. So. Yeah, that body basically doubles back
one hundred and eighty degrees on top of itself. And
there's a lot of debate. I mean, should we get
into that, like the great torsion debate.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
Yeah, we can at least touch on it. Sure, it's
almost impenetrable if you're not a malacologist.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, I would say so. So as far as when
torsion emerged, they're not exactly sure because you can't tell
from like a fossil whether or not a you know,
you can find a fossil of a shell, but the
torsion is happening within the shell, so you can't really
tell if it's been torsioned. Is that even a verb?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I don't know, torted, I was gonna say torted. I
didn't look it up, though, So I think tort it's right,
let's say torted.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, I think it's torted. So you can't really tell
if it's been torted by looking at a fossil. And
so there's just been a lot of debate, like, obviously
this happened for a reason. No one knows exactly what
that was. And like you mentioned at the beginning, some
of the sort of old farmer's tails. One of those
is you might hear some gardening people say, oh, well,
(15:35):
actually they're asymmetry inside that shell provides balance, and that's
just not true.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
No, No, that's definitely not There's also one that back
in the day when they were all marine animals, because
land snails evolve from marine aquatic snails, that it was
a way to keep their hind quarters, their tails, all
that stuff from being bitten by a predator. Probably it
(16:03):
does make sense, it's probably not it what the two
biggest competing hypothesis are the rotation hypothesis and the asymmetrical hypothesis.
And the rotational hypothesis the one that's been around since
like nineteen twenty nine, and it basically says that at
some point in the past, the the snail, some snail
(16:26):
mutant came along and twisted around during its development and
it became naturally selected because it was advantageous because it
allowed the snail to retract its head faster, whereas before
it would have had to retract the tail and then
the head. Now it can retract the head because it's
all it had to retract.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, but that was just like a spontaneous thing, right, That's.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
What the that's what they think. But it's just such
a bizarre thing to have happen, especially in a single mutation,
because again, what we're talking about is during the larval
development an body, it count it moves counterclockwise to one
hundred and eighty degrees, and so its circulatory and nervous
system forms a figure eight inside the shell. It's not
(17:11):
all just packed in there straight. It's all over the place.
And because of that weird torsion thing, the entire right
side of its anatomy, including its organs, are just not there.
It's all left side organ stuff. It all just got
moved over toward the inside of the shell because the
right side is pressed up against the shell itself, and
it's all because of torsion. And they just cannot figure
(17:33):
out why that would have happened in the past. And
clearly it could have happened as a as a like
a mutation that obviously did, but why would it have
been naturally selected for for hundreds of millions of years,
which strongly implies that it was like an advantageous mutation.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, I would think so, right, Yeah, so that's.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Kind of like this debate that's going on that that is,
I mean, you really have to understand snail at tom
me and evolutionary history to go much further in understanding
that debate. That's pretty much what I could glean from
the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah, and I would say hesitate even getting into that debate.
If you've had a couple of drinks at the bar
and you're feeling a little squarely and you want to
dive into this hot conversation.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, I would staer clear, just take a.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Break and have another drink and just relax.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah, or maybe it's time for you to go home.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Right, yeah, get a car to take you home, or
walk or whatever.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Yeah. So that's very careful. Snails tort and we're not
sure exactly why, but what we do know the upshot
of it is that their body is double back on
itself and there their anus and their head are essentially
right next to each other.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yes, exactly. They also have a mouth and inside that
mouth is something called a radula. It's a it has
teeth on it, and it's like a it's kind of
like a tongue, and they have You know, if you
look at a snail and they turn those two little
tentacles to look back at you, that's because they have
eyes mounted on either one or two pairs of tentacles,
(19:08):
and they can look at you. They can't hear you.
They don't have ears. From what I saw, snails are
basically deaf. But they can see you.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
They can see you, and depending on the species, there's
different types of eyes. Some have very simple eyes where
they can detect changes in light and dark or maybe
maybe movement. But there's some kinds I think that have
the ability to see you, to focus on you. And
because they're on the ends of those stalks, they can
(19:39):
retract the eyes themselves in the stalk, and then the
stalk into the head, and then the head into the shell,
and then when they want to see if danger's gone,
they can peak one of those stalks out from the shell.
Look around. Isn't that cool?
Speaker 2 (19:53):
That's pretty cool? Yeah, I love it. And there's also
the mantle, and the mantle will come up quite a bit,
and the best I could figures that may mantle is
that area around the rim of the shell that connects
the foot in the head to the shell itself, right.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah, and it's also whatever holds all of our organs
and guts in place. That membrane is very analogous to
the mantle tissue of the snail because it holds all
the organs in place, but it also does something really important.
It secretes all of the stuff that eventually is built
into the shell itself.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
So are we at the shell partner?
Speaker 2 (20:31):
You think you know what? This is a good We're
twenty minutes in. I think we should take a break, yeah,
because that shell formation is quite a cliffhanger. Okay, and
we'll be right back after this, all right, So we
(21:07):
promised to talk to you a little bit about the shell.
A snail shell is beautiful. You should never ever ever
smash a snail shell or a snail because that's animal
cruelty and it's a terrible thing to do, so just
don't do it. Right, But it is basically there's a
little bit of protein in there, but it's mainly something
(21:28):
called calcium carbonate, and it is, like you said earlier,
secreted by that mantle tissue, and it builds up over time.
If you look at sort of the center part of
that shell. That's the oldest part of the shell. You
can tell a snail's age by how big that shell is.
And that's also the hardest part of the shell because
it's been around longer. So they just keep adding material
(21:51):
along that outer edge little by little as it expands outward.
And that is why a like the outer edge of
a snail shell will be much more you know, sort
of breakable than the inside harder part.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
That makes sense. So the oldest part is the closest
to the to the center.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, apparently.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Also I didn't realize this. They're born with a tiny
shell already attached. They just grow it over time by secrete.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Starter starter shell exactly and then cut.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Yeah, they're born like little tiny baby snails like that preformationism,
uh theory from our things we used to believe before
the Scientific Method episode.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
So I also said, Chuck, the mantle holds the mantle
tissue holds all the the important guts and stuff like
that in place. And the way that snails breathe is
through the mantle cavity. They have blood vessels in there,
but they breathe using kind of like a primitive. I
don't want to say long. I think that's kind of
(22:51):
a stretch. But basically they have an opening that.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
It's called a lung. I've seen it called the lung
in diagrams.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Okay, so I've also seen it called a new numastome,
and it's essentially a breathing port that they can open
and close using their muscles that takes in air and
exhales air. But it's pretty neat and it's right there
next to their head, right there at the aperture where
everything else that needs to be outside is.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah, and they can if you're talking about sea snails,
Like I said, we're not going to get two into them,
but they can have similar body parts in terms of breathing,
or they can also have gills kind of upfront as well.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah. So one of the things snails are most famous
for is there mucus right Yeah, that is apparently secreted
by the foot, And as the foot moves along, it's
just a series of muscles that just kind of propel
as they ripple, propel the snail along, but they lay
down a trail of mucus that does a lot of
(23:49):
different things. For one, it allows the snail to do
some Spider man esque moves, like just crawl right up
the side of a building because it's very strong.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
It's glue like, Yeah, but it can be it's funny
because it can be glue like or act as a
lubricant exactly, which is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Yeah. So yeah, it also separates the snail from the
rest of the world that it's running over. Yeah, you know,
it's strong like glue, but it also allows the snail
to move smoothly, and it also protects the snail's body
from sharp things that it might be crawling over slowly
crawling over. And it also keeps the moisture locked inside
(24:31):
so much so that snail mucin, as we'll see, has
been used for millennia as like kind of a skin thing.
If you have very dry skin and you can get
your hands on snail mucan or mucous, it will cure
your dry skin.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Yeah, I mean that's what keeps the I mean that
and other things is what keeps that snail moist. So
if it's keeping the snail alive, then imagine what it
can do for your crow's feet exactly. I only think
we said what was actually made of. It's enzymes, peptides, proteins,
trace minerals, and it's it's pretty remarkable stuff. It's you know,
(25:11):
the tailtale sign is when you see that stuff on
the sidewalk, and just the term snail trail itself, that
sort of snotty, glistening, shiny snail trail is you know,
it's become sort of part of the lexicon to you know,
as a stand in for other things at times.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
So yeah, for sure. So one of the other things
that the snail trail, the mucous trail does is it says, hey, sailor,
come come this way, right, because it's one way that
snails find one another to mate, which is surprising that
they mate because they're hermaphroditic. They all snails, or most
(25:48):
species of land snails are equipped with both male and
female sex organs. But and when they come together to mate,
it's there's no telling who's who or who's doing what,
because in the end both of them often come away
with fertilized eggs.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, I mean, to me, this section is the most
remarkable stuff about snails. How they reproduce is just amazing.
They are hermaphroditic because and it just makes sense, if
you're moving point five inches per second, you would die
out as a species if you if like a male
(26:25):
had to search for a female or the other way around.
So they basically just double their chances of finding somebody
within the you know, ten feet or so that they're
they're wandering around. I mean they move more than that
within a lifetime, obviously, but you know, if it's that
time of year, which is what.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Like autumn, sure, autumn and spring.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Autumn and spring, they're gonna wander around, they're gonna find
another snail. They're gonna dance around each other, and that
just means very slowly circle each other for I saw
four to six hours. I saw. The whole thing can
take up to twelve hours. It's a very obviously as
you would imagine, a very slow process.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
It is slow, but it's really involved, like they are
really into it. While they're they're going at.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
It, yeah, I mean they're they're and this is before
they're going at it. This is when they're just sort
of like sizing each other up. They're getting their steam,
they're touching tentacles, they're biting each other's lips. Things are
getting really pretty hot and heavy in there. And then
they have something that is amazing, and I don't know
if any other animal that has something like this. They
(27:37):
have something called a love what they call a love dart.
A love dart only forms after the first mating, so
you have to have at least a little bit of
sexual experience to even form a love dart. Sure, they
take about a week to form, and you don't always
have to have one to mate, because if you've used
up your love dart and then you know within the
(27:59):
week you want to go at it again, you can
still do that. It's not necessary for reproduction, but it
helps in reproduction. They form in the dart sack and
is stored in a dart sack, and if you look
at it, it's a little It is a little dart.
It's got this little sharp harpoon like tip and they actually,
it says they shoot it, but it doesn't like fly
(28:22):
through the air. It's more like a they stab one
another with it.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Oh, I imagine it like ew and then just sailing
a couple feet and then spraying.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
That would be great. It's more like it's stabbing. But
apparently it's very imprecise. This hydraulic pressure builds up as
they circle and bite each other's lips and then they
shoot this thing out at each other and it can
I think about a third of the time it doesn't
even do it it's intended to do, which we'll get
to in a sect, but it can pierce organs. It
can go all the way through the head and out
(28:52):
the other side. So it's really crazy. It's a weird adaptation.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah, no, it's super weird. And the I think what's
most weird about it to me is there's other animals
that do that to deliver sperm. That's not what the
snails are doing. These love darts deliver other hormones that
help protect the sperm as it makes its way to
the eggs to fertilize. It's like a really clumsy, superfluous
(29:21):
extra step that, like you said, doesn't even like they
miss a lot of the time. They still manage to
fertilize eggs. It's just a very strange thing that they do.
But it's part of this really long, really slimy courtship mating,
you know, process that they get involved in. And then
the sex itself is like just one rubs its foot
(29:44):
against the other foot and there you go.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Right and they say who's pregnant which, and they go,
I don't know, Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Both of them, Yeah, both of us.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Actually can it be both?
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, that both both can walk
away with fertilized eggs after this.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, and they can lay. I think they can hatch
up to four hundred and fifty eggs per year, and
that doesn't take very long. Actually, right in the gestation
period it can be like really short.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Right for some species, especially in captivity, it can be
twenty four hours. Others it seems like the outside is
four weeks, and usually in the while, it's like two
to four weeks for gestation.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, and once those little guys are born, they may
immediately start eating the rest of the eggs as their
first meal.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Yeah. It's kind of a bummer, especially because leading up
to it, it's so cute, this little tiny snail with
its little tiny shells inside its egg, and it starts
tapping its way out until it cracks through the egg.
And then yeah, it gruesomely eats its siblings very quickly.
Sometimes it'll eat smaller siblings that have already hatched, not
just the eggs. What I didn't realize though, is that
(30:51):
some and that's actually not all snail species. That's ones
that will eat eggs, but for the most part they'll
eat just vegetation.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
The snail parent will often stay nearby to provide protection
for the young snail hatchlings for a little.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
While they hang out for a while, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I did not realize though, I thought it was pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, they can. They can hang out for up to
three months together while the parents are kind of protecting them.
And like you said, they're born with that little baby
shell and just gets bigger and bigger. They did we
talk about how long they can live.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
No, we didn't. It's pretty spectacular.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
Yeah, I mean in the wild they can live up
to five years, which that shocked me quite frankly.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah. Really, I feel bad for all the snails you've
accidentally stepped on after a rainy evening.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
You hope at least they were old.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah, exactly, like they had their time.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Yeah, so five years is a pretty long time in
the wild. I think in captivity they can live up
to twenty five years, which is astounding.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yeah. There's a really great little short documentary called The
Strange and Wonderful War Old of the Snail Wrangler. It's
on YouTube and it's about this woman who takes photos
of her snail friends in like little miniature settings, human settings.
It's really cute, and she talks about one of her
snail companions that she's been with for like ten years.
(32:17):
And it's just, I mean, when you think of it
like that, like snails are just so they're off doing
their own thing. They live in a world far different
from ours, even though we share the same geography. It's
just a different world. So when you cross paths with one,
you're like, hey, alien, and they're probably like, hey, giant alien.
And that's it. The idea that they're there in that
(32:38):
same patch as long as you are. In some cases,
when you're like if you live at a house for
ten years, a snail might have lived there just as
long as you did for the same time, Like you
shared that with them that whole time. It's they're not
just this anonymous, generic animals running around there. They I mean,
anything that lives that long, there's just something substantial to
(33:00):
it than you would think initially.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Are you saying snail has the soul?
Speaker 1 (33:07):
I think it's pretty clear.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yes, all right, so snails are doing their things. I
love this account that Alison found that was a scientist
from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History that said snails
are leaky bags of water that survive on dry land.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
And it almost sounds like they're saying like they happen
to survive, because it doesn't seem like a snail was
really made for that environment. But they survive anyway because
snails really need to stay moist, like a snail drying out,
just like a slug, means certain death. So even though
there are snails in the desert, you're mainly going to
(33:46):
find snails in more moist areas. We're gonna say that
word quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I apologize, I was gonna say, unlike humans, moist is
a snail's favorite word. It really is.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
They do live on the ground, mainly if they're a
trust real snails, but they can live in trees, but
they really like it down there on the ground in
that sort of moist outer layer of decaying plant matter.
They're pretty active at night because things can get wetter overnight,
as we know, like when you wake up with like
(34:17):
morning dew and stuff like that. So they're just down
there on the ground sometimes eating meat and other snails
and other eggs. But generally what they're doing is eating
and munching down on that either decaying plant matter, or
if you have a garden, they will also munch down
on your nice new fresh plants.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah, and as we'll see that, they run a foul
of gardeners for that reason. But just hold your horse
as gardeners, put your rubber mallets away for a second
until we get to that part and talk you out
of it. But in that leaf litter layer, they do
a lot of really important stuff they are in charge of,
(34:56):
like recycling plant matter, decay stuff. They love decaying everything
in addition to live plants to they love dead plants.
And when they're doing that, they're like recycling nutrients. They
eat that stuff, they break it down and they poop
it out, and that means it's bioavailable in the soil
for plants to use, for other animals to come along
(35:18):
and like that, like to lick the dirt, that kind
of thing. They also are really important in the food
web because calcium is not really easy necessarily to come
by in food, at least if you're like a small
like an invertbrate or a mammal or something like that.
If you eat a snail shell, you get a burst
(35:39):
of calcium, so that snailshell is really important. And then
they're also chok full of protein themselves. So they're like
a really important part of any food web in the
ecosystem that they live in.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah, they're also moving stuff around down there. I mean,
plant matter in that outer layer that just sits and
sits isn't great. But if they're if you've got thousands
of snails moving around through it, it's gonna help drainage out.
It's going to help keep distributing those nutrients if there's
you know, it can help move dirt and clay even important.
(36:13):
All that stuff is great. And they can actually help
pollinate too. Some of them are nighttime pollinators. They get
in there with that plant nectar, they eat that stuff
and then they poop that out as well.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah, pretty crazy. I had no idea that they were pollinators.
It just makes them even more important, you know what
I mean totally. So I think, Chuck, we take a
break and then we come back and talk about why
you should leave the snails alone. How about that.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
So one thing that we said earlier, Chuck, was that
snails run a foul of gardeners, and the reason why
is because they will, I mean, they will eat a
lot of plants. The Burgundy snail also known as the
Roman snail, the one that's mostly used for s cargo
these days. They weigh twenty gramsish as an adult, but
(37:26):
they'll eat six grams of plant matter in a day. Yeah,
you have a bunch of burgundy snails running around your garden.
They're gonna eat your hostas, they're gonna eat your seedlings.
They're going to tick you off. And so there's a
lot of a lot of animosity that gardeners have towards
snails and slugs too, and so they people have been
(37:47):
trying things to get rid of snails for a very
long time. The problem is number one, you don't actually
want to get rid of snails, especially native snails or
common garden snails. And number two, the meta that's typically
used are chemical and they can harm other life as well. Yeah,
so there's you basically want to leave the snails alone
(38:07):
as much as possible.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah. There is some information here that Allison got from
the Royal Horticultural Society in Britain, and they say, you know,
don't use chemical pesticides please, Like, if you want to
get rid of your snails, you can try and do
so naturally by introducing predators. I guess you know, you
(38:31):
throw a bunch of garden beetles out there and see
what happens. Just say, whoever whoever walks out of here
alive is, you know, deserves to live. It's like the
Thunderdome exactly. To enter one leaves.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
As a matter of fact, if you're bored, just go
ahead and build a small scale replica up the thunderdome
and put the snail in the beetle in you.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
That's right, But then you have to act like Tina
Turner and use that voice when he raggedy snail. That's
what you would have to call it.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
That was a great impression, by the way, Chuck, thank you.
In addition to putting them in a death match against beetles,
you can go pick them out yourself. If you go
out at night with the flashlight, you can pick pick
up plenty of snails.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
The thing is you put them in your neighbor's guard.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, exactly, Especially if they're a jerk hosta grower, they
will really drive them crazy. Now what you want to
do is put them on your compost pile, because again,
they like decaying stuff and they're really useful, so they'll
be pretty happy there. And you can also trap them
by carving out like melons or grapefruit or something like that,
and they'll be attracted to that, and it's just basically
(39:41):
acts as a trap. You just throw it back on
your compost pile the next day and there you go.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
All right.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Some people do, say you some people still use pesticides
if you're if you're organic, use feric phosphate, which interrupts
their abilit to digest so they die of starvation in
a few days. There's another one called metaldehyde that is
hardcore stuff. It desiccates them. They end up dehydrating to death,
(40:13):
and it's banned in the EU because they consider it
unacceptably harmful to birds and mammals. Of course, here in
the US you can use it as much as you like.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Of course you can.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
And they use it for the giant African land snail
in particular, because again metaldehyde is hardcore stuff, and it
turns out that the giant African land snail is hardcore snail.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, it's a hard core snail obviously would be an
invasive species here in North America. These are the big ones,
the one that look like a bunny. I thought they
can be eight inches long. They eat more than five
hundred species of plant. They will eat everything in their paths,
including in Florida. They're a real problem in Florida. Apparently
(40:58):
they will eat the stucco off your house to get
more calcium, and they can pass disease along to people
and animals. Youah, rat lungworm, Yeah, meningitis. I've seen that there.
They can carry a host of parasites, or they can
host a host of parasites, some of which will is
(41:19):
you know, good for the snail because it keeps animals
from eating them, So it's like a defense mechanism, right,
But that can be harmful to people at times as well.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah, yeah, you don't want rat long worm. Like you said,
it can create meningitis in humans. So it's best to
not really handle snails with your bare hands, and especially
don't eat the snail alive from your garden. That's a
really bad idea.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Yeah, but people actually collect and I'm not sure if
that's how they got here, but people collect these, you know,
as an illegal pet, these giant African land snails.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
That's my understanding that they were imported as illegal pets,
at least to south in the world.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Are people doing.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
I don't know, but they also have been have shown
up in some other places, including Hawaii and Polynesia, and
somehow they got from Florida to these places, probably through
the illegal pet trade. And so, in just typical human
fashion in the fifties, people said, well, wait, there's this
(42:22):
snail called a rosy wolf snail, and it's a predator.
It's a little literal snail predator. It's just important bunch
of them to take care of this giant African land
snail because I'm sure nothing will possibly go wrong because
of this plan. It's foolproof. And that's what they did,
and as a result, Hawaii has lost almost all of
its native snail species in the wild because the rosy
(42:45):
wolf snail was like, I'd just rather eat these other
kinds of snails than leave the giant African snail alone.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah, these things are pretty creepy, though. I imagine there's got
to be some kind of nat geo video of the
wolf snail, like, you know, following its prey because for
a snail, they're moving pretty fast. Yeah, when they're tracking something,
they go double to triple their normal speed. They will
(43:12):
go up a tree after something. They will go underwater
after something for a little while until they need to
come up. It seems like they're just tenacious little fellas
and they will go after something until they catch it.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Yeah, and they like to swallow other snails whole, including
their shell.
Speaker 2 (43:29):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
And there's a malacologist named Harry g Lee who dissected
a rosy wolf snail and found thirteen other snails shells
in its gut.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, that's a lot, a lot. It's like in a
Louisiana state license plate.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
Yeah exactly. So, Yeah, you don't want these things on
your beautiful, pristine island. And once you bring them in,
they're going to cause all sorts of problems. And that's
what that Goodbye Snail video was about. It's definitely worth watching.
But the rosy wolf snail is definitely considered invasive. And
what I didn't know, Chuck, is the common garden snail,
the one we're so familiar with, is considered invasive in
(44:09):
the United States. Corn new espresso, that is the common
garden snail, and it was originally important because it was
the one that used to be es cargo, and some
of them escaped from farms and set up shop in
the wild. And now it's called the common garden snail
because it became so prolific.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah, and they don't know when people started eating es cargo.
And I think es cargo is is the French name
for that edible snail. And also doubles is the name
of the dish.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I think you're right, like French things both.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Yeah, but you know, people like this stuff. It was always,
you know, growing up, you always heard about es cargo
was like this, you know, sort of as a as
a kid, the first fancy, weird food you'd heard of.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
Probably do the wealthy have no bounds kind of.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Exactly. And then you know, we've got all signs. Should
we finish up with just a bunch of kind of
cool factoids, Yeah, for sure. Well. Jewelry. Snail shells have
always or have long been used as jewelry for humans,
as some of the oldest known human jewelry. They found
the stuff like necklaces and stuff made of sea snail
(45:27):
shells that date back like at least one hundred and
twenty thousand years.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
That's nuts man.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, what else?
Speaker 1 (45:33):
The author Patricia high Smith, who was a very interesting
person in her own right. She wrote The Strangers on
a Train and the Talented Mister Ripley novels. She was
a snail pal like the snail wrangler in that video
that I talked about, And like the snail wrangler in
that video that I talked about, she would go out
in public with her snails as companions. There's a story
(45:55):
of Patricia Highsmith at a party who was revealed to
have dozens of snails in her purse who she brought
so she'd have someone to talk to her snail friends.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
Yeah, how about that?
Speaker 1 (46:06):
How about that? That's what snail people do? Is that
kind of thing?
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Yeah? Yeah. This is really interesting is they've been studying
how snails might help us figure out Alzheimer's disease. From
what I found is they've you know, we've talked about
Alzheimer's before, which is when you have these amyloid plaque
build up or plaques I guess that build up on
the brain tissue, and they don't exactly know how it
(46:32):
causes memory loss, but this is what they're trying to
figure out what the snails. These plaques are formed from
a protein called amyloid beta, which we've talked about, or
a beta, and they have taken a beta and put
it on otherwise very healthy pond snails. I have no
idea why they chose, like why they thought the pond
snail was a good candidate to begin with.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Terrible lobbying group.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
Maybe that's what it is. But they put this a
beta on these healthy ponds snails and within twenty four
hours they show evidence that they have harmed their memory basically,
but the finding is that they haven't found any damage
to the brain tissue, like no cell loss, no brain
tissue damage at all. So basically what they have sort
(47:18):
of you know the result of all that is that
ABTA by itself can trigger the memory loss and it's
not from like damage to the brain or like a deterioration.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Of the brain or the platte build up, right.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah, exactly. They think it's like a specific pathway for
memory that's being damaged and the brain itself. Thank you
pond snails, I know it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
I also saw it goes the other way too, that
the common garden snails mucus has been found to be
bioactive as an anti inflammatory, antioxidant and anti apoptic, which
means it prevents cell death. Oh wow, so they think
that they are figuring out how to turn that into
a drug to treat Alzheimer's. So snails are just coming
(48:01):
at us with the one two punch to battle Alzheimer's disease.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Yeah, God blessed love it.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
Speaking of God bless them, if you're subscribe to the
West African Yoruba religion, you would say God bless the
snail because they're associated with Obatala, the sky Father, as
well as the Arisha's collective deities, to whom the land snail,
the giant African land snail in particular, is sacred.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
I gotta read this last thing. This is the only
last thing I got. Okay, this Nigerian snail recipe. Yeah,
I'm not in to eat snails. They call this congo meat.
It's got red pepper, habnio's okay, garlic, onion, and then
a season with cayenne and ground crayfish.
Speaker 1 (48:47):
Yeah, you lost me at Hobin Euro But it does
sound extremely interesting. I would try it. I'd just be like,
can you leave the hobbin Niro out.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
Too hot, too hot, Yeah, too hot for the hot
top Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Too hot tv uh huh. So I've got one more thing, chuck,
let's hear it. There is a weird thing that started
popping up at the end of the thirteenth century in
northern France. If you look through illuminated manuscripts, meaning manuscripts
that have the doodles in the margins and all that,
like a map magazine, yeah, you will start to notice
(49:22):
there are pictures of nights battling giant snails.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
Oh yeah, that's so interesting.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
And they It lasted for like one hundred or so years,
is like a trend. It actually came back again for
a little while in the fifteenth century, and no one
has any idea what they were trying to say. One
of the theories is that it is just hilarious that
it was Menu's like kind of comic relief. While you're
reading like this kind of heavy text or whatever, you
just look over and you're like, that's a night battling
(49:48):
a snail, right.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Other people say that the snails symbolize something like superhuman
strength because they carry their house on their back. I
kind of pooh poo that one I like this the
comic relief one.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
And people were just like, hey, this is funny. Look
at this. This night's fighting a snail.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
Yeah, this will be good for a laugh, said the
medieval monk. Very interesting, I say so too. So if
you want to know more about snails, everybody, go forth
research them. You could do worse than watching the strange
and wonderful world of the Snail Wrangler. And goodbye snails.
And if you see a snail in your garden, and
especially if it's not doing anything to harm things, you
(50:24):
just tip your hat to it and say good day, snail.
You could be as much as five to ten years old.
That's right, Chuck said, that's right. This means it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (50:38):
Yeah, we're going to do a correction. I wish we
could get this one out sooner because we're going to
continue to get emails about the Great isotope ion. My
goodness issue, which I didn't know is an issue. This
was we had a lot of them. But this is
from Nick Lufty, PhD student at UC Irvine, and Nick
(51:01):
is getting a PhD in quantum chemistry.
Speaker 1 (51:05):
Oh wow, man, I want to hang out with you Nick.
Speaker 2 (51:10):
And Nick listens with his wife Dinah, Hey, Dinah, and said,
can't wait till we're in town for a show. But
if you're at Irvine, I mean Irvine. How far is
that from San Francisco. I mean it's in the state
of California. So Scott to just be like an hour
away exactly.
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Yeah, everything in California is an hour away.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
Come see us. Hey, guys, wanted to offer a slight
correction about the periodic table. Don't hate me. When you
mentioned the different weighted averages being a result of different isotopes,
you mentioned that it is the loss or gain of
an electron that constitutes the different isotopes. This is actually incorrect.
What you've defined is an ion, not an isotope. It
(51:50):
is the varying number of neutrons that makes up the
different flavors of isotopes. This is the thing that makes
carbon dating possible. I love that episode. By the way.
Last thing, guys, mystry as a whole is a very
inaccessible branch of STEM. I hated it. I failed my
first che chemistry class in one day. Our professor was
out sick, and the chair of the chem department came
(52:11):
to sub in and she implored us to get a
PhD in chemistry. I said to myself, she must be nuts.
Here I am ten years later and I am clearly
the one who is nuts. The long and short of
this last bit is to never give up on science. Nice,
and that again is from Nick. I think it said lufty,
but it's actually lutfi.
Speaker 1 (52:33):
Okay, like Chipotle chipolte. Yeah, that's right, Thanks a lot, Nick.
We'll call him nick L from now on. Yeah, that
was a great one. So everybody who wrote in to
let us know, we appreciate you for doing that because
we like to get things right and that was definitely
a slip up and it is something that we needed
to correct for sure. So good job Chuck picking that one.
Speaker 2 (52:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:56):
Well, if you want to get in touch with us
and let us know we got something wronger something right,
or tell someone about yourself or your dog or your
pet goat doesn't matter, you can send it via email
to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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Betrayal Season 5
Saskia Inwood woke up one morning, knowing her life would never be the same. The night before, she learned the unimaginable – that the husband she knew in the light of day was a different person after dark. This season unpacks Saskia’s discovery of her husband’s secret life and her fight to bring him to justice. Along the way, we expose a crime that is just coming to light. This is also a story about the myth of the “perfect victim:” who gets believed, who gets doubted, and why. We follow Saskia as she works to reclaim her body, her voice, and her life. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com