Animals, features and articles | Educational Science

Feb 28, 2007

Snails Save Energy by Re-Using Mucus Trails

In order to conserve valuable energy, snails essentially play a game of follow-the-leader, a new study finds. Snails create trails of mucus to that help them glide across the ground, mainly in search of food or a partner, but making all that mucus uses up a lot of energy. Snails...

Sep 19, 2007

Ancient Polynesian Fashion Explains Snail Mystery

For more than a century, scientists have puzzled over how Tahitian tree snails slugged from Tahiti to two relatively distant Polynesian islands. Even more mind boggling, while the Tahiti snails sport a range of shell colors, the island-hoppers are all white. Finally, the case has been solved. And it's all...

Oct 31, 2007

Snails Fashion Their Own Camouflage

Some snails take organic fashion to a new, and disgusting, level. A land snail on the Canary Islands slurps up crusty lichens and applies them with its mouth to paint mounds of the mucky cover-up onto its shell. The result is a camouflaged snail that's not much of a looker....

Mar 25, 2009

Snail Shells Getting Longer

The shells of certain Atlantic Ocean snails — a key link of the food chain — have gotten significantly longer over the past century, a new study finds. Using museum collections from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, a team of researchers measured the shells from 19 lots of...

Jan 18, 2010

Tough Snail Shell Could Inspire Better Body Armor

A snail's shell that protects it from attacks underwater could provide clues for designing improved body armor to guard human soldiers, a new study suggests. The research involved an unusual sea snail, the so-called scaly-foot snail which was first reported in 2003 and makes its home in the harsh environment...

Jan 26, 2010

Slow Snails Are Quick to Make New Species

Snails may split into different species rapidly precisely because they move so slowly, scientists now suggest. These new findings could explain why some kinds of organisms have far more species than others. Different populations of one species begin splitting into new species when they stop mating with each other. As...

Aug 18, 2010

Fearful Snail Becomes Better Breeder

Inbreeding is typically not the best way to produce healthy offspring. But for one snail species, inbred offspring are better than none. A brown-shelled, freshwater snail, Physa acuta, is a hermaphrodite that will fertilize and lay eggs alone — an undertaking scientists refer to as selfing – when no potential...

Dec 7, 2010

Evolutionary Twist: Snails Trade Awkward Sex for Survival

Snails whose shells coil counterclockwise have trouble hooking up with snails whose shells twist clockwise since their bodies don't line up properly. Turns out, the contrary snails trade awkward sex for an increased chance of not being eaten by snakes, researchers find. Scientists investigated land snails in Japan and Taiwan...

Dec 14, 2010

A Sea Snail Glows From the Inside

Tracing the mysterious green flashes of light produced by a sea snail has revealed a creature built to shine from the inside – and with a shell that may be designed for communication as well as protection. Typically found in tight clusters or groups at rocky shorelines, the clusterwink snail,...

Apr 21, 2011

New Aussies: Ancient Snail-Chomping Marsupials Discovered

Strange hammerlike teeth seen in two newfound species of ancient marsupials -- teeth unknown in any other mammal -- were the weapons they once used to smash open snail shells. Oddly, a bizarre group of lizards alive today in the rain forests of eastern Australia possess extraordinarily similar teeth, and...

Jul 6, 2011

Mystery of Fast-Spreading Snails Solved

Snails strewn on both shores of the Mediterranean were apparently scattered there by people, yielding new clues into ancient routes of human expansion across the area. The land snail Tudorella sulcata can be found on both the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. As snails are renowned for traveling...

Oct 10, 2011

Amazing Mollusks: Images of Strange & Slimy Snails

Beautiful Bubbles (Image credit: Denis Riek)Two female bubble-rafting violet snails, Janthina exigua. This is the most common species of bubble-rafting snail. Violet Rafting Snail (Image credit: Denis Riek)Janthina janthina, a bubble-rafting violet snail. The snail excretes mucus from its foot and uses the raft of bubbles to float from place...

Oct 10, 2011

Snails Sail Through Life on Bubbles of Mucus

Snails that get around on rafts of mucous-y bubbles inherited the talent from ancestors that carried their eggs around like balloons on a string, a new study finds. In the process, the slimy snails transformed themselves from ocean-floor dwellers to free-moving floaters. The bubble-rafting snails are part of the family...

Aug 8, 2012

Tiny Snail, Thought Extinct, Rediscovered by Grad Student

In 2000, the oblong rocksnail — about the size of a nickel with a yellow body and a banded shell — was declared extinct in its home, Alabama’s Cahaba River Basin. But a graduate student has rediscovered these snails on a short stretch within the Cahaba River, where it crosses...

Aug 22, 2012

Tiny Exotic Snail Invades Earth

The New Zealand mudsnail is tiny, about the size of a pencil point, but it is colonizing the planet. The snail has spread far from its home, throughout rivers, lakes and streams in Europe, Australia, Asia and America. In the United States, where it has no natural predators or parasites,...