Slugs and Snails

« Yet more scientific deals… | Home | My Fellow Americans »

By Linda | December 6, 2008

I love to cook with fresh herbs and decided to winter over my herb plants indoors this year rather than toss them out after the first freeze. My thyme plant sits on a granite ledge above my kitchen sink below some windows. When I went to water it the other night, I noticed something stuck to the outside of the white ceramic pot. Thinking it was a bit of soil, I went to wipe it off with my bare hand and immediately realized that the thing clinging to the pot was not dirt at all. It was clammy, sticky, slimy and cold. It looked and felt like a piece of particularly nasty snot. It was a garden slug!

I’d never really stopped to examine one closely before so I held the pot up to the light & took a good look. What a marvelously disgusting bit of animal life! As I watched, the creature extended its two sinuous feelers forward on its head and began to slide across the side of the pot leaving behind a shiny trail of slug ooze. I remembered that once when I had mentioned to a friend that I liked to eat escargot, she had grimaced and told me that the famous french snails were nothing more than slugs with shells. Now, as I watched this grey-white blob of mucous advance across my herb pot, I suddenly had to find out if that was really true.

The answer is YES. Slugs and Snails are related.

Slugs and snails belong to a larger group (or Phylum) known as the Mollusca. Mollusks come in many different forms but are predominantly categorized as soft-bodied animals without body segmentation that often have an external shell. Octopus, cuttlefish, oysters and squid belong to this phylum as well.

Snails and slugs are also gastropods, which means “stomach foot”. This describes the way in which the body and internal organs of slugs and snails has been twisted back so that the stomach lies above the large fleshy foot of these animals. The head is at one end of this foot. Snails and slugs move by gliding along a surface of mucus or slime that is produced from glands on the foot. Whelks, Conches and Abalone are also classified as gastropods.

Most gastropods contain both male and female reproductive organs in the same body. When two individuals mate, they exchange bundles of sperm, usually via a dart into the tissue of the other. Eggs are then laid in crevices in the soil or under rocks. A few species give birth to live young.

Gastropods are generally herbivores and scavengers, feeding on fungi, dead animal material and plant matter such as leaves, stems, bulbs and algae. A few are carnivorous and may even prey on their own kind. All gastropods feed by using a radula, which is a tongue-like structure covered by rows of rasping teeth.

There is quite a lot to learn about our slimy friends; slugs & snails. Learn more on The University of Vermont Slugs and Snails page.

It looks like our mates across the pond are about to suffer from a different sort of British invasion; Slugs! Read all about it at The Daily Mail Online.