COMMON SNAILS

The Common or Garden Snail (Cornu aspersum).  Shell looks a bit battered but carrying on regardless.  Relieved that the dry spell was over but will hide away if it gets hot and dry again.  They like damp conditions.  As do the banded snails in the Cepaea genus, which can be brown, yellow or striped.  

You can see the 'eyes on the ends of the long upper tentacles.  They can't really 'see' but can detect light and dark.  The lower tentacles are shorter and are organs of touch and smell. 

Snails and slugs are gastropods which means tummy-foot.  They travel along by muscular waves of this tummy-foot, secreting a thixotropic mucus to help them glide.  Garden Snails can reach a top speed of 47mph (METRES per hour) or 1.3 cm per second.

They enjoy soft vegetation like new shoots and seedlings and often climb quite high up trees and walls in their search for food.  Don't make the mistake of leaving your barbecue leftovers outside - they are quite partial to lamb chops too!  They feed with a very rough tongue called a radula, scraping one layer off at a time.

Snails are hermaphrodite and use so called 'love darts' to turn each other on.  If you want to know more check out this wikipedia link.  Each snail can then produce about 80 spherical white eggs.  They can lay 5 or 6 batches of eggs a year.

Predators include song thrushes, humans with beer traps, and glow worms, which inject the snail with venom to paralyse it and then feast as in the photo below.

Glow worm photo: wikipedia