Striped mauve and black snail found on my bergenias:
These two are probably both Cepaea nemoralis, the grove snail, which comes in many colours and patterns.
And a yellow snail, found at an antique fair, last Sunday:
No identifiable species for this one.
And, a little more sensibly, a couple of interesting links:
A six-kilometre trek on the back of a snail: from Not Exactly Rocket Science.
For long journeys, the shell of a snail hardly seems like the ideal public transport. That is, of course, unless you're an even smaller snail...And Aydin Örstan, of Snail's Tales, writes about Battillaria minima, sea snails, and their social behaviour, in Clustering of the intertidal snail ... He says,
"the distributions of these snails were often patchy: there would be areas 2-3 meters wide where I would see none of them and then there would be a cluster of 50 or 100 snails."And then does a simple experiment to watch them congregate.
Laurie was just commenting on this last week, watching our local Batillaria attramentaria at Boundary Bay. It's interesting that it doesn't seem to be just an effect of water currents, etc.
I wonder if it's mating behaviour, spring fever and all that; or do they hang out in groups all year round?
More experimentation is needed.
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That monkey must be drunk. It's slipped off the snail's saddle.
ReplyDelete(I'll wager those sentences have never been stuck together before.)
I don't think they have. The situation doesn't arise too often.
ReplyDelete:D