Stumbling Upon Snails

A few weeks ago, I decided to go to the pond and try to rake and see what I could find. I searched for a garden rake and found one hanging on the zipline tower. Walking around the edge of the pond, I looked for a mucky leafy spot because the snails love to gather in those dirty spots. When I found a spot I wanted, where a good many leaves were, I started raking them out of the pond onto the bank. I bent down to examine a little pile of the wet leaves to see what I could find.

I turned over a leaf and there was a water snail! I had stumbled upon a shelled gastropod. Excitedly I ran to the house, got a transparent plastic container, and returned to rake out more leaves to find more snails! I filled the container with water, then put a little chunk of wood in, as well as a leaf I raked out of the pond a couple minutes before. I caught lots of assorted sizes of water snails. The biggest one I caught was about one inch, from head to tail. The giant African snail can grow to be eight inches long! That is a monstruous snail.

With the snails safely put into their new home, I got a little bit of lettuce, and put it into the container for them to eat. Water snails cannot see well, but they have a particularly good sense of smell. They eat algae, water plants, little pieces of vegetables, and sometimes water insects that have died. Since they are gastropods, they are slow moving mollusks that travel on one large foot. Snails are invertebrates which means that they don’t have a backbone. They have a shell instead that protects them.

I kept the snails in the container for about a week, then I took them out and replaced the old dirty water for nice fresh clean water from the pond. I also put a fresh piece of lettuce in too. In a couple minutes the snails were all over the leaf dining. Snails can have up to 14, 175 teeth! That is a lot of choppers. Their teeth are attached onto their tongue and used to scrape their food, like a file.

One chilly morning I went out to check my snails. After removing the lid off the container, I looked in and saw the water was frozen! Rapidly I picked up the container and brought it into the house to thaw the ice. I was afraid the snails had frozen. A couple of hours later, I checked on the snails, and the ice was melted, and the snails were eating the lettuce I had put in the day before. I was glad they did not freeze. I thought it was amazing how they survived the ice.

After a couple of weeks of watching them, it was time to let them go. A snail can live up to two to five years in the wild, and larger ones can live up to twenty-five years! I did not want to keep the snails that long. I took them to the pond and put the snails back in one by one. They sank to the bottom and disappeared under the wet mud-covered leaves. It was fun to watch and study about them. The next time I want to catch and keep water snails, I will know better how to keep and care for them.

~Jonah