Beachcomber: 101 years old and still concerned about snails
SNAILS are having a pretty rough time of it at the moment to judge from current academic research. On one day last week, I was sent information regarding no fewer than three items which were enough to have snails quaking in their shells.
The first was news of research led by the American Museum of Natural History which has discovered five new species of snail-sucking snakes in Ecuador and Peru.
This immediately brought to mind some research I saw eight years ago about snail-sucking snakes in Asia which preyed upon a particular species of snail.
It reported that most of these molluscs had shells which spiralled clockwise but a minority went anti-clockwise.
For physical reasons, clockwise snails cannot mate with their anti-clockwise cousins, which made it harder for the anti-clockwise minority to find mates.
The snakes however had evolved teeth on one side of their tongues which were particularly adept at pulling snails out of clockwise shells, so they posed less of a threat to the anti-clockwise variety.
The disadvantage of lower potential mate selection was thus balanced by an advantage in snake-evasion.
Yet with five more species of snake added to the world’s snail-eaters, and no information on whether these new species have a preference for left or right-handed snails, my concern for the poor molluscs grew, but worse was to come.
No sooner had I seen news of the snake discovery that I found another paper on mantis shrimps which increased my worries.
Apparently these shrimps have an appalling habit of flicking their claws at great speed to hit and shatter the shells of snails in order to get the poor creatures out and eat them.
As if that was not bad enough, the merciless mantises have now been shown to position their bodies when approaching a snail so that they will hit the shell at its most vulnerable point.
Snakes try to pull snails out of the open end of their shells but the clever mantises have found their shellshattering strategy to be a more efficient way to fill their dinner plates.
Finally, to further increase the insult to snails, news has come from Ecuador of plans to protect the newly discovered snail-eating snakes, as four of the five species are believed to be endangered.
Having confirmed, through examination and DNA analysis, that the snakes do indeed represent previously undiscovered species, the researchers decided to auction the rights to name the species, with the winning bids funding a conservation project to protect the areas in which the snakes have been found.
As Alejandro Arteaga, who was head of the snake-finding team points out, naming an entire species after someone you love is a fine opportunity to show your admiration, especially as the name will be used by all the scientific community and, with luck, by the general public. I feel however that the snails would waggle their antennae in horror.