Snails

Snails are similar in most ways to Slugs apart from their shell. This is their most striking feature and close study reveals wonderful geometric patterns. Unless you find them a gastronomic delight and comsume the palatible species, the fascination ends there, since they can be just as pestilent as their slimy cousins.

  
Garden Snail                       White-lipped Banded Snail

The Garden Snail Helix aspersa (above left) can grow to 38 mm wide with five dark bands on a fawn background. They are usually found during the day behind stones and clinging to walls where they are sheltered by a climbing plant. They become active at night or occasionally during dull moist days, when they can avoid predators and drying sunshine. They can live for about three years.

The White-lipped Banded Snail is about 16 mm wide and can be all yellow, but usually there are a number of darker bands in variable colours and numbers.

As with slugs each snail has male and female reproductive organs, but they do mate to exchange sperm. This occurs on a warm, wet night and afterwards they part to go and lay up to 40 spherical, fertilised eggs in a shallow depression. After a month small replica snails hatch out and the shell enlarges as they grow.

Major predators are the Song Thrush and Blackbirds which break the shell on a stone.

Snails are a bit easier to find and easier to pick up, due to their shells, so inspect the undersides of objects and pick them off. Ground-feeding birds such as Thrushes and Blackbirds love them and like a boulder to smash them against. See the monograph on Slugs for more methods to defeat them.

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