Josh Clark (2:41)

Wow. Inch and long. 0.5 inches per second.

Chuck Bryant (2:46)

Yeah, it's like that one guy said, life is a highway. I want to ride it all night long, covering only an inch.

Josh Clark (2:58)

Was that the parenthetical of that title?

Chuck Bryant (3:00)

Yeah, it was. It was like you had to read between the lines.

Josh Clark (3:03)

Yeah, exactly.

Chuck Bryant (3:04)

What a great song.

Josh Clark (3:06)

Or play it backwards. That song, you think is great?

Chuck Bryant (3:09)

Yeah, I do. I do. If you take away all the. It's actually a great song. It's very upbeat and enthusiastic and very. It's just a good song.

Josh Clark (3:20)

Who was that?

Chuck Bryant (3:21)

I. I don't remember. I think that might have been his only song. Although now that I've said that, I'm sure he's a huge sensation in Canada or something. And now everybody's gonna be mad at us.

Josh Clark (3:30)

Yeah, that happens a lot.

Chuck Bryant (3:32)

We'll find out. But anyway, whoever you are out there, who made that song, if you're listening, Breton cap off to you. That's right, Chuck. I picked this one.

Josh Clark (3:44)

He is Canadian, by the way.

Chuck Bryant (3:46)

I knew it. Dude.

Josh Clark (3:47)

How does that always happen?

Chuck Bryant (3:49)

I don't know. I don't know. What's his name?

Josh Clark (3:52)

Tom Cochran.

Chuck Bryant (3:53)

I wanted to say Tom, but I wanted to say Tom Brokaw, and I was like, I'm not even gonna bring that up.

Josh Clark (3:58)

And you know what? He's in the Canadian Music hall of Fame.

Chuck Bryant (4:01)

Oh, my God.

Josh Clark (4:03)

So, so much for that.

Chuck Bryant (4:05)

Okay. At any rate, hats off, Tom Cochran, I think is what I was trying to say. Right.

Josh Clark (4:11)

Mm.

Chuck Bryant (4:12)

So we're doing an episode on snails, which I'm kind of psyched about. Our new good friend Allison helped us with this one. I believe this is her second one. She's doing great.

Josh Clark (4:23)

Yeah. Was this a listener recommendation?

Chuck Bryant (4:26)

No, this was a Josh recommendation.

Josh Clark (4:29)

Okay. I didn't know if this was. You know, we did some stuff recently with kids in the classroom, like little virtual appearances for our book stuff Kids Should Know. And I know we got a lot of ideas, and just for some reason, I thought snails might have been one of those.

Chuck Bryant (4:44)

Not a single one of those kids came up with the idea of snails. It was really sad.

Josh Clark (4:49)

Kids these days, they don't even know what snails are.

Chuck Bryant (4:51)

Snails. That was my pick, and I'm not sure where it came from. I think I just pulled it out of my head, but I'm glad I did, because this is one of those things where. I mean, snails are everywhere. Everyone knows what a snail is like. It's just a part of living on Earth. You know about snails. And yet what Allison turned up and I wasn't aware of when I selected this, there's actually a bit of a dearth of information, academic information on snails specifically, that a lot of what we think we know about them is actually just like old yarns that gardeners have come up with over the years. So I love topics like that. And actually, from researching this, I've come to actually really appreciate snails. Like, I actually kind of think they're cute now just from watching them in some videos.

Josh Clark (5:40)

Well, I looked up a picture of the. And we'll talk about these in a little more detail later. But that giant African snail, and there was one picture of a woman holding one of these things.

Chuck Bryant (5:53)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (5:53)

And Ash, I swear it looked like a bunny rabbit with a turtle shell.

Chuck Bryant (6:00)

Weird. I have not seen that picture.

Josh Clark (6:03)

It looked like a bunny. I mean, it's a snail. Clearly it didn't look that much like a bunny. I wasn't like, what in the world?

Chuck Bryant (6:10)

Maybe it was eating a bunny. Is that what it was?

Josh Clark (6:13)

I don't think so. But you were right. Allison was keen to point out that malacology, which is someone who studies mollusks, is just. I guess there's just not a ton of those people out there. So there just tend to be more people studying furrier, cuter things than snails, I guess.

Chuck Bryant (6:31)

Right, Exactly. And even if you do have a lot of malacologists, they're studying mollusks, and snails just make up part of one class of a larger phylum of mollusca. They're part of gastropoda. And it's not just snails and gastropoda. We're talking slow slugs, sea slugs, conchs, whelks, limpets. Basically, all snail like creatures are in the gastropoda class.

Josh Clark (7:00)

So they're gastropodes.

Chuck Bryant (7:01)

Yeah. Or gastropods.

Josh Clark (7:03)

Okay, I didn't know how that was pronounced.

Chuck Bryant (7:05)

So it's gotta be gastropod, right?

Josh Clark (7:08)

I mean, I think it's gastropod, but would it be gastropoda?

Chuck Bryant (7:12)

No.

Josh Clark (7:12)

Or is it one of those weird things that just flips when you shorten it?

Chuck Bryant (7:15)

It's that second thing.

Josh Clark (7:16)

Okay, great.

Chuck Bryant (7:20)

So I said, also, Chuck, just living on Earth, you're aware of snails. And there's a reason for that. They've been around for a really, really long time. They are everywhere. And you can. Even if you're walking around Antarctica and you look down on the ground, you might see a snail waving up to you wearing a parka.

Josh Clark (7:41)

Yeah. And even if you know, snails, as we will find out, love moisture, even if you're in the desert. Even if you're in Arizona, living there in Phoenix, you might see a snail because there's still random water here and there.

Chuck Bryant (7:55)

Yeah. Plus also, some of them have evolved to really hang on to their water better than other times so they can survive in the desert. It's just nuts. They're everywhere. And as a matter of fact, they think that they. There's about 150,000 gastropod species in total. Remember, that includes slugs and all that stuff, but they think snail species are between 30,000 and 35,000. And I mean, you know, we think of snails as typically like the little garden snail, maybe the escargot snail. I think that's the Roman snail, if I'm not mistaken. But there are all sorts of snails. You mentioned the giant African land snail. Those things get. I saw that. They get to be about the size of a human fist or bigger. That's a big snail. But on the other end, there's another type of snail that they recently discovered, and I think Vietnam and Cambodia on the walls of caves, and they can fit inside like a grain of sand. They're that small. But if you look at them under a microscope, they are very clearly snails.

Josh Clark (9:00)

Yeah, I saw about 500 native species to North America, and we're generally going to be talking about, you know, sort of your average land snail, but there are snails that live exclusively in the water under the sea. It would, you know, there's just no way we could talk about all the snails. So we're going to mainly concentrate on the kind that leave that mucousy trail on the sidewalk.

Chuck Bryant (9:26)

Right. Like, we could probably get through 34,000 species today, but definitely not 35,000.

Josh Clark (9:33)

That's right. So we're not getting dry.

Chuck Bryant (9:35)

Okay. So the other thing that's kind of like a bummer about snail species is that as long as we've been scientifically paying attention to snails, we've recorded more than 400 extinctions of snail species. And there's a. An Atlantic short documentary. I think it's like 12 minutes long. I think it's called Goodbye Snails. And it's set in Hawaii, where they're experiencing this crazy mass extinction of their native snail species that exist nowhere else in the world. And it's a really kind of a tense little documentary, but the people who are trying to rescue these snail species and prevent them from extinction are really doing some amazing work over there.

Josh Clark (10:23)

Yeah, there's about a thousand of them that are land snails alone that are endangered right now. So that's a Lot of species to be in trouble. So that's no good, because, as we will see, there can be invasive snails, and they can do some harm to the garden, but they also do a lot of great things for your garden and for the world.

Chuck Bryant (10:42)

Yeah. Leave the snails alone.

Josh Clark (10:46)

You ever eat them?

Chuck Bryant (10:48)

I have, like, once or twice. I'm not crazy about them. No, they're not. I'm not an escargot fan. I'm a fan of the escargot joke, though.

Josh Clark (10:56)

Right. Which is. Look at that. Escargot. Is that what it was?

Chuck Bryant (11:03)

A snail painted an S on the side of his car?

Josh Clark (11:06)

That's right. That's a great elementary school kid joke.

Chuck Bryant (11:08)

Yep. That's wonderful.

Josh Clark (11:11)

I was trying to remember if I've ever. I feel like I might have tried it one time. Many, many, many years ago, because I do remember seeing snails floating in a buttery solution on a plate, and I think there was a little tiny tong.

Chuck Bryant (11:30)

Yeah, that sounds good. Yep.

Josh Clark (11:32)

But I really had a very, very faint memory. So if I did try it, I don't know under what circumstance it was, but it was a long time ago, and it's not something I'd really be into now.

Chuck Bryant (11:43)

They even have, like, a specialized plate for serving them, and it basically doubles as, like, a deviled egg serving plate, too. It's like, you know, got a bunch of depressions in it that the snails sit in.

Josh Clark (11:53)

Right. I'd rather have a deviled egg. You can also eat snail eggs. They call it white caviar.

Chuck Bryant (12:00)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Josh Clark (12:01)

That's a thing. There's. I think it's like 130 bucks for about 1.75 ounces.

Chuck Bryant (12:10)

Wow. Wow. Well, that's a lot of snail eggs, now that I think about it.

Josh Clark (12:14)

Yeah, it seems like it. I mean, it looks like it comes in a little tin, like caviar, but although I do love caviar now, I don't think I would try snail caviar.

Chuck Bryant (12:26)

Okay, okay, I'll accept that answer.

Josh Clark (12:30)

And I know I've talked about. I'm new ish to caviar. Just the past couple of years, so it wasn't something I ever had until semi recently.

Chuck Bryant (12:36)

But now you have it at dinner every night.

Josh Clark (12:40)

You've heard of avocado toast? Every morning, I just have caviar toast. Spread it all over the biggest piece

Chuck Bryant (12:45)

of sourdough I can with gold flakes on top.

Josh Clark (12:48)

All right. Should we talk about the body of a snail?

Chuck Bryant (12:51)

Yeah, I feel like we kind of have to, because there's a lot of misconceptions people have about snails, including me, as far as their body goes.

Josh Clark (13:00)

Yeah. I mean, we can talk about their shell for a little bit. They have that. Well, we'll talk about the shell kind of throughout. It's obviously a protective device. Snail can pull themselves back into that shell and they can actually put a little. I think it's called an epigram. And that is like a. It's like a front door, basically. It's a temporary front door that they can put on the whole of that shell. So if you ever pick up a snail shell and it's covered with something that is a temporary front door that a snail uses to keep people like you from poking around into that snail shell.

Chuck Bryant (13:42)

Yeah. And I saw that some of them have denticles on there, like sharp kind of tooth like projections, so that if a predator tries to come in there after them, they'll get all torn up.

Josh Clark (13:52)

Oh, on the epigram?

Chuck Bryant (13:53)

Yeah. It's like those reverse tire damage things at, like, a car rental parking lot. And it's like that, from what I

Josh Clark (14:00)

understand, that's pretty cool. And it also keeps them moist because what a snail does not want to do is dry out, because, once again, a snail is basically a slug with a helmet on.

Chuck Bryant (14:14)

Right. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the misconceptions of how the snail body is arranged, if we can.

Josh Clark (14:22)

Let's do it.

Chuck Bryant (14:24)

Inside that shell is the actual body of the snail. What we see as the head and the. In the tail is actually the head. True. But what looks like the tail is actually like the heel of its foot. That's what it's moving around on is its foot. Right.

Josh Clark (14:41)

A single foot.

Chuck Bryant (14:42)

Exactly. And so above, on top of that foot, is the whole body and all that is encased in the shell. And what's weird is there's one opening that the. What'd you say? Covers the opening?

Josh Clark (14:54)

The. I think it's called an epigram.

Chuck Bryant (14:56)

Okay.

Josh Clark (14:57)

I'm sorry, I've been saying epigram. Epiphrame.

Chuck Bryant (15:00)

Epiphrame.

Josh Clark (15:00)

Diaphragm.

Chuck Bryant (15:01)

Okay, gotcha. So what the epiphram covers is called the aperture. And on land snails, there's one aperture, there's one way in, one way out. And because all of their body is tucked up in the shell, they've still got to poop, they've still got to breathe, they still have to do all the stuff that requires the. The outside atmosphere. And so what they've done is they've figured out how to double their Bodies around so that their head and their tail, including their anus, are basically right next to one another at the aperture at the opening of their shell.

Josh Clark (15:33)

Yeah. Kind of like on top of their head. And this is something called torsion, which means to twist. You know, if you've heard of something, you've heard of torsion before. Probably.

Chuck Bryant (15:43)

Yeah. Chubby Checker was going to call his dance the Torsion. And he's like, he just doesn't have the right ring. Let's do the torsion. Right. Traveler from the future came back in time and told him, no, we should call this the Twist. Rocked out the high school dance, and that was history.

Josh Clark (16:01)

That's pretty good. Did you think of that one beforehand?

Chuck Bryant (16:05)

No.

Josh Clark (16:06)

Okay.

Chuck Bryant (16:07)

No, I didn't. I've just gotten that. Good. This late in the year?

Josh Clark (16:11)

I love it. So, yeah, that body basically doubles back 180 degrees on top of itself. And there's a lot of debate. I mean, should we get into that? Like, the great torsion debate?

Chuck Bryant (16:26)

Yeah. We can at least touch on it. Sure. It's almost impenetrable if you're not a malacologist.

Josh Clark (16:33)

Yeah, I would say so. So as far as when torsion emerged, they're not exactly sure because you can't tell from, like, a fossil whether or not you can find a fossil of a shell, but the torsion is happening within the shell, so you can't really tell if it's been torsioned. Is that even a verb?

Chuck Bryant (16:53)

I don't know.

Josh Clark (16:54)

Tortid.

Chuck Bryant (16:54)

I was gonna say tortid. I didn't look it up, though. So I think tort. It's right. Let's say tortid.

Josh Clark (16:59)

Yeah, I think it's tortured, so you can't really tell if it's been tortured by looking at a fossil. And so there's just been a lot of debate. Like, obviously this happened for a reason. No one knows exactly what that was. And like you mentioned at the beginning, some of the sort of old farmer's tales. One of those is you might hear some gardening people say, oh, well, actually, their asymmetry inside that shell provides balance. And that's just not true.

Chuck Bryant (17:27)

No, no, that's definitely not. There's also one that back in the day, when they were all marine animals, because land snails evolved from marine aquatic snails, that it was a way to keep their. Their hindquarters, their tails, all that stuff, from being bitten by a predator.

Josh Clark (17:47)

Probably.

Chuck Bryant (17:48)

It does make sense. It's probably not. It what? The two biggest competing hypotheses are the rotation hypothesis and the asymmetrical hypothesis and the, the rotational hypothesis, the one that's been around since like 1929. And it basically says that at some point in the past, the, the, the snail, some snail mutant, came along and twisted around during its development and it became naturally selected because it was advantageous, because it allowed the snail to retract its head faster. Whereas before it would have had to retract the tail and then the head. Now it could retract the, the head because it's all it had to retract.

Josh Clark (18:31)

Yeah, but that was just like a spontaneous thing, right?

Chuck Bryant (18:34)

That's what they think. But it's just such a bizarre thing to have happen, especially in a single mutation. Because again, what we're talking about is during the larval development, a snail's body, it moves counterclockwise to 180 degrees. And so its circulatory and nervous system forms a figure eight inside the shell. It's not all just packed in there straight, it's all over the place. And because of that weird torsion thing, the entire right side of its anatomy, including its organs, are just not there. It's all left side organ stuff. It all just got moved over toward the inside of the shell because the right side is pressed up against the shell itself. And it's all because of torsion. And they just cannot figure out why that would have happened in the past. And, and clearly it could have happened as a, as a, like a mutation that obviously did, but why would it have been naturally selected for, for hundreds of millions of years? Which strongly implies that it was like an advantageous mutation.

Josh Clark (19:36)

Yeah, I would think so. Right.

Chuck Bryant (19:38)

Yeah. So that's kind of like this debate that's going on that, that is, I mean, you really have to understand snail anatomy and evolutionary history to go much further in understanding that debate. That's pretty much what I could glean from the whole thing.

Josh Clark (19:52)

Yeah. And I would say hesitate even getting into that debate. If you've had a couple of drinks at the bar and you're feeling a little squirrely and you want to dive into this hot conversation.

Chuck Bryant (20:02)

Yeah, I would steer clear, Just take

Josh Clark (20:04)

a break, have another drink and just relax.

Chuck Bryant (20:07)

Yeah. Or maybe it's time for you to go home, right?

Josh Clark (20:11)

Yeah. Get a car to take you home or walk or whatever.

Chuck Bryant (20:15)

Yeah. So that's snails tort. And we're not sure exactly why, but what we do know, the upshot of it is that their body is double back on itself and their, their anus and their head are essentially right Next to each other.

Josh Clark (20:30)

Yes, exactly. They also have a mouth. And inside that mouth is something called a radula. It's a. It has teeth on it and it's like a. It's kind of like a tongue. And they have, you know, if you look at a snail and they turn those two little tentacles to look back at you, that's because they have eyes mounted on either one or two pairs of tentacles. And they can look at you, they can't hear you, they don't have ears. From what I saw, snails are basically deaf. But they can see you.

Chuck Bryant (21:04)

They can see you. And depending on the species, there's different types of eyes. Some have very simple eyes where they can detect changes in light and dark or maybe, maybe movement. But there's some kinds, I think, that have the ability to see you, to focus on you. And because they're on the ends of those stalks, they can retract the eyes themselves in the stalk and then the stalk into the head and then the head into the shell. And then when they want to see if danger's gone, they can peek one of those stalks out from the shell and look around. Isn't that cool?

Josh Clark (21:38)

That's pretty cool.

Chuck Bryant (21:39)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (21:40)

I love it. And there's also the mantle, and the mantle will come up quite a bit. And the best I could figure is that mantle is that area around the rim of the shell that connects the foot and the head to the shell itself, right?

Chuck Bryant (21:52)

Yeah. And it's also whatever holds all of our organs and guts in place. That membrane is very analogous to the mantle tissue of the, of the snail because it holds all the organs in place. But it also does something really important. It secretes all of the stuff that eventually is built into the shell itself.

Josh Clark (22:12)

That's right.

Chuck Bryant (22:14)

So are we at the shell part, do you think?

Josh Clark (22:18)

You know what, this is a good. We're 20 minutes in. I think we should take a break because that shell formation is quite a cliffhanger. Okay, and we'll be right back after this.

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Josh Clark (25:33)

All right, so we promised to talk to you a little bit about the shell. A snail shell is beautiful. You should never, ever, ever smash a snail shell or a Snail. Because that's animal cruelty and it's a terrible thing to do, so just don't do it.

Chuck Bryant (25:49)

Right.

Josh Clark (25:51)

But it is. Basically, there's a little bit of protein in there, but it's mainly something called calcium carbonate. And it is, like you said earlier, secreted by that mantle tissue. And it builds up over time. If you look at sort of the center part of that shell, that's the oldest part of the shell. You can tell a snail's age by how big that shell is. And that's also the hardest part of the shell because it's been around longer. So they just keep adding material along that outer edge, little by little as it expands outward. And that is why a. Like the. The outer edge of a snail shell will be much more, you know, sort of breakable than the inside, harder part.

Chuck Bryant (26:30)

That makes sense. So the oldest part is the closest to the. To the center.

Josh Clark (26:35)

Yeah, apparently.

Chuck Bryant (26:37)

Also, I didn't realize this. They're born with a tiny shell already attached. They just grow it over time by secreting starter shell. Exactly. Isn't that cute? They're born like little tiny baby snails. Like that preformationism theory from our Things We Used to Believe before the Scientific Method episode.

Josh Clark (26:56)

That's right.

Chuck Bryant (26:57)

So I also said, Chuck, the mantle holds. The mantle tissue holds all the. The important guts and stuff like that in place. And the way that snails breathe is through the mantle cavity. They have blood vessels in there, but they. They breathe using kind of like a primitive. I don't want to say lung. I think that's kind of a stretch. But basically they have an opening that.

Josh Clark (27:20)

It's called a lung. I've seen it called a lung in diagrams.

Chuck Bryant (27:23)

Okay. So I've also seen it called a new pneumostome. And it's essentially a breathing port that they can open and close using their muscles. That takes in. Takes in air and exhales air. But it's pretty neat. And it's right there next to their head, right there at the aperture where everything else that needs to be outside is.

Josh Clark (27:42)

Yeah. And they can. If we're talking about sea snails, like I said, we're not going to get too into them, but they can have similar body parts in terms of breathing, or they can also have gills kind of up front as well.

Chuck Bryant (27:55)

Yeah. So one of the things snails are most famous for is their mucus, right?

Josh Clark (28:01)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (28:02)

That is apparently secreted by the foot. And as the foot moves along, it's just a series of muscles that just kind of propel as they ripple. Propel the snail along, but they lay down a trail of mucus that does a lot of different things. For one, it allows the snail to do some Spider man esque moves, like just crawl right up the side of a building because it's very strong. It's glue, like.

Josh Clark (28:27)

Yeah, but it can be, it's funny because it can be glue like. Or act as a lubricant.

Chuck Bryant (28:32)

Exactly.

Josh Clark (28:33)

Which is pretty remarkable.

Chuck Bryant (28:34)

Yeah, so, yeah, it also separates the snail from the rest of the world that it's running over. You know, it's strong like glue, but it also allows the snail to move smoothly. And it also protects the snail's body from sharp things that it might be crawling over, slowly crawling over. And it also keeps the moisture locked inside. So much so that snail mucan, as we'll see, has been used for millennia as like kind of a skin thing. If you have very dry skin and you can get your hands on snail mucin or mucus, it will cure your dry skin.

Josh Clark (29:12)

Yeah, I mean, that's what keeps the. I mean that and other things is what keeps that snail moist. So if it's, if it's keeping the snail alive, then imagine what it can do for your crow's feet.

Chuck Bryant (29:24)

Exactly.

Josh Clark (29:26)

I don't think we said what it was actually made of. It's enzymes, peptides, proteins, trace minerals, and it's pretty remarkable stuff. The telltale sign is when you see that stuff on the sidewalk. And just the term snail trail itself, that sort of snotty, glistening, shiny snail trail is, you know, it's become sort of part of the lexicon to, you know, as a stand in for other things at times.

Chuck Bryant (29:54)

So. Yeah, for sure. So one of the other things that the snail trail, the mucus trail does is it says, hey, sailor, come, come this way.

Josh Clark (30:05)

Right.

Chuck Bryant (30:06)

Because it's one way that snails find one another to mate, which is surprising that they mate because they're hermaphroditic. They both. All snails, or most species of land snails are equipped with both male and female sex organs. And when they come together to mate, there's no telling who's who or who's doing what because in the end, both of them often come away with fertilized eggs.

Josh Clark (30:31)

Yeah, I mean, to me, this section is the most remarkable stuff about snails. How they reproduce is just amazing. They are hermaphroditic because. And it just makes sense if you're moving 0.5 inches per second, you would die out as a species if like a male had to search for a female or the other way around. So they Basically just double their chances of finding somebody within the 10ft or so that they're wandering around. I mean, they move more than that within a lifetime, obviously. But if it's that time of year, which is what, like autumn?

Chuck Bryant (31:10)

Sure. Autumn and spring.

Josh Clark (31:12)

Autumn and spring, they're gonna wander around, they're gonna find another snail, they're gonna dance around each other. And that just means very slowly circle each other for I saw four to six hours. I saw the whole thing can take up to 12 hours. It's a very obviously, as you would imagine, a very slow process.

Chuck Bryant (31:34)

It is slow, but it's really involved. Like they are really into it while they're. They're going at it.

Josh Clark (31:41)

Yeah, I mean, they're. And this is before they're going at it. This is when they're just sort of like sizing each other up. They're getting steam, they're touching tentacles, they're biting each other's lips. Things are getting really pretty hot and heavy in there. And then they have something that is amazing. And I don't know of any other animal that has something like this. They have something called a love. What they call a love dart. A love dart only forms after the first mating. So you have to have at least a little bit of sexual experience to even form a love dart.

Chuck Bryant (32:15)

Sure.

Josh Clark (32:16)

They take about a week to form. And you don't always have to have one to mate. Because if you've used up your love dart and then within the week you want to go at it again, you can still do that. It's not necessary for reproduction, but it helps in reproduction. They form in the dart sacrifice and is stored in a dart sack. And if you look at is a little dart, it's got this little sharp harpoon like tip. And they actually. It says they shoot it, but it doesn't like, fly through the air. It's more like they stab one another with it.

Chuck Bryant (32:51)

Oh, I imagine it like, pew. And then just hailing a couple feet and then sproing.

Josh Clark (32:57)

That would be great. It's more like it's stabbing, but apparently it's very imprecise. This hydraulic pressure builds up as they circle and bite each other's lips. And then they shoot this thing out at each other. And it can, I think about a third of the time. It doesn't even do what it's intended to do, which we'll get to in a sec. But it can pierce organs. It can go all the way through the head and out the other side. So it's really crazy. It's A weird adaptation?

Chuck Bryant (33:24)

Yeah, no, it's super weird. And I think what's most weird about it to me is there's other animals that do that to deliver sperm. That's. Yeah, that's not what the snails are doing. These love darts deliver other hormones that help protect the sperm as it makes its way to the eggs to fertilize. Yeah, it's like a really clumsy, superfluous extra step that, like you said, doesn't even. Like they, they miss a lot of the time. They still manage to fertilize eggs. It's just a very strange thing that they do. But it's part of this really long, really slimy courtship, mating, you know, process that they get involved in. And then the sex itself is like just one rubs its foot against the other foot and there you go. Right.

Josh Clark (34:13)

And they're. And they say, who's pregnant which? And they go, I don't know. Yeah, maybe both of us.

Chuck Bryant (34:17)

Yeah, both of us, actually.

Josh Clark (34:19)

Can it be both?

Chuck Bryant (34:20)

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Both can walk away with fertilized eggs after this.

Josh Clark (34:25)

Yeah. And they can lay. I think they can hatch up to 450 eggs per year. And that doesn't take very long, actually. Right. In the gestation period, it can be like really short. Right.

Chuck Bryant (34:38)

For some species, especially in captivity, it can be 24 hours. Others it seems like the outside is four weeks. And usually in the wild it's like two to four weeks for gestation.

Josh Clark (34:48)

Yeah. And once those little guys are born, they may immediately start eating the rest of the eggs as their first meal.

Chuck Bryant (34:55)

Yeah, it's kind of a bummer, especially because leading up to it, it's so cute. This little tiny snail with its little tiny shell is inside its egg and it starts tapping its way out until it cracks through the egg. And then. Yeah, it gruesomely eats its siblings very quickly. Sometimes it'll eat smaller siblings that have already hatched, not just the eggs. What I didn't realize, though, is that some. And that's, that's actually not all snail species. That's ones that will eat eggs, but for the most part, they'll eat just vegetation.

Josh Clark (35:26)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (35:27)

The snail parent will often stay nearby to provide protection for the young snail hatchlings. For a little while.

Josh Clark (35:36)

Yeah, they hang out for a while, right?

Chuck Bryant (35:37)

Yeah, I did not realize that. Which I thought was pretty cool.

Josh Clark (35:40)

Yeah. They can hang out for up to three months together while the parents are kind of protecting them. And like you said, they're born with that little baby shell and just gets Bigger and bigger. Did we talk about how long they can live?

Chuck Bryant (35:54)

No, we didn't. It's pretty spectacular.

Josh Clark (35:57)

Yeah. I mean, in the wild, they can live up to five years, which. That shocked me, quite frankly.

Chuck Bryant (36:01)

Yeah. It really makes you feel bad for all the snails you've accidentally stepped on after a rainy evening.

Josh Clark (36:08)

You hope at least they were old.

Chuck Bryant (36:10)

Yeah, exactly. Like, they had their time.

Josh Clark (36:12)

Yeah. So five years is a pretty long time in the wild. I think in captivity, they can live up to 25 years, which is astounding.

Chuck Bryant (36:20)

Yeah. There's a really great little short documentary called the Strange and Wonderful World of the Snail Wrangler. It's on YouTube, and it's about this woman who takes photos of her snail friends in, like, little miniature settings, human settings. It's really cute. And. And she talks about one of her snail companions that she's been with for, like, 10 years. And it's just. I mean, when you think of it like that, like, snails are just so. They're off doing their own thing. They live in a world far different from ours. Even though we share the same geography, it's just a different world. So when you cross paths with one, you're like, hey, alien. And they're probably like, hey, giant alien. And that's it. The idea that they're there in that same patch as long as you are. In some cases, when you're like, if you live at a house for 10 years, a snail might have lived there just as long as you did for the same time. Like, you shared that with them that whole time. It's. They're not just anonymous, generic animals running around. They're. They. I mean, anything that lives that long, there's just something more substantial to it than. Than you would think initially.

Josh Clark (37:30)

Are you saying a snail has a soul?

Chuck Bryant (37:33)

I think it's pretty clear, yes.

Josh Clark (37:36)

All right, so snails are doing their things. I love this account that Alison found. There was a scientist from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History that said snails are leaky bags of water that survive on dry land. And it almost sounds like they're saying, like, they happen to survive because it doesn't seem like a snail was really made for that environment. But they survive anyway because snails really need to stay moist. Like a snail drying out. Just like a slug means certain death. So even though there are snails in the desert, you're mainly gonna find snails in more moist areas. We're gonna say that word quite a bit. I apologize.

Chuck Bryant (38:17)

Yeah. I was gonna say, unlike humans, moist is a snail's favorite word.

Josh Clark (38:22)

It really is they do live on the ground, mainly if they're terrestrial snails, but they can live in trees. But they really like it down there on the ground in that sort of moist outer layer of decaying plant matter. They're pretty active at night because things can get wetter overnight, as we know, like when you wake up with morning dew and stuff like that. So they're just down there on the ground sometimes eating meat and other snails and other eggs. But generally what they're doing is eating and munching down on that either decaying plant matter or if you have a garden, they will also munch down on your nice new fresh plants.

Chuck Bryant (39:02)

Yeah. And as we'll see that they run afoul of gardeners for that reason. But just hold your horses, gardeners. Put your, your rubber mallets away for a second until we get to that part and talk you out of it. But in that leaf litter layer, they do a lot of really important stuff. They, they are in charge of like, recycling plant matter, decaying stuff. They love decaying everything. In addition to live plants, too, they love dead plants. And when they're doing that, they're like recycling nutrients. They eat that stuff, they break it down and they poop it out. And that means it's bioavailable in the soil for plants to use for other animals to come along and like that, like to lick the dirt, that kind of thing. They also are really important in the food web because calcium is not really easy necessarily to come by in food, at least if you're like a small, like an invertebrate or a mammal or something like that. If you eat a snail shell, you get a burst of calcium. So that snail shell is really important. And then they're also chock full of protein themselves. So they're like a really important part of any food web in the ecosystem that they live in.

Josh Clark (40:17)

Yeah, they're also moving stuff around down there. I mean, plant matter and that outer layer that just sits and sits isn't great. But if you've got thousands of snails moving around through it, it's going to help drainage out. It's going to help keep distributing those nutrients. If there's, you know, it can help move dirt and clay even.

Chuck Bryant (40:38)

That's very important.

Josh Clark (40:39)

All that stuff is great. And they can actually help pollinate, too. Some of them are nighttime pollinators. They get in there with that plant nectar, they eat that stuff, and then they poop that out as well.

Chuck Bryant (40:52)

Yeah, pretty crazy. I had no idea that they were pollinators. It just Makes them even more important. You know what I mean?

Josh Clark (40:58)

Totally.

Chuck Bryant (40:59)

So I think, Chuck, we take a break and then we come back and talk about why you should leave the snails alone. How about that?

Josh Clark (41:05)

Let's do it.

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Chuck Bryant (44:06)

So one thing that we said earlier, Chuck, was that snails run afoul of gardeners. And the reason why is because they will. I mean, they will eat a lot of plants. The. The burgundy snail, also known as the Roman snail, the one that's mostly used for escargot these days. They weigh 20 grams ish as an adult, but they'll eat 6 grams of plant matter in a day. Yeah, you have a bunch of burgundy snails running around your garden. They're going to eat your hostas, they're going to eat your seedlings. They're going to tick you off. And so there's a lot of. A lot of animosity that gardeners have towards snails and slugs, too. And so people have been trying things to get rid of snails for a very long time. The problem is, number one, you don't actually want to get rid of snails, especially native snails or common garden snails. And number two, the methods typically used are chemical and they can harm other life as well. So there's. You basically want to leave the snails alone as much as possible.

Josh Clark (45:12)

Yeah. There is some information here that Allison got from the Royal Horticultural Society in Britain, and they say, don't use chemical pesticides, please. If you want to get rid of your snails, you can try and do so naturally by introducing predators. I guess, you know, you could throw a bunch of garden beetles out there and see what happens.

Chuck Bryant (45:35)

Sure.

Josh Clark (45:36)

Just say, whoever walks out of here alive deserves to live. It's like the Thunderdome.

Chuck Bryant (45:42)

Exactly.

Josh Clark (45:44)

Two enter one leaves.

Chuck Bryant (45:46)

As a matter of fact, if you're bored, just go ahead and build a small scale replica of the Thunderdome and put this nail and the beetle in you sicko.

Josh Clark (45:54)

That's right. But then you have to act like Tina Turner and use that voice when. Hello, Raggedy snail. That's what you would have to call it.

Chuck Bryant (46:05)

That was a great impression, by the way, Chuck.

Josh Clark (46:08)

Thank you.

Chuck Bryant (46:08)

In addition to putting them in a death match against beetles, you can go pick them out yourself. If you go out at night with the flashlight, you can pick up plenty of snails.

Josh Clark (46:20)

The thing is, you put them in your neighbor's garden.

Chuck Bryant (46:22)

Yeah, exactly. Especially if they're a jerk hosta grower. They'll really drive them crazy. Now what you want to do is put them on your compost pile because, again, they like decaying stuff and they're really useful, so they'll be pretty happy there. And you can also trap them by carving out, like, melons or grapefruit or something like that. And they'll be attracted to that. And it's just basically acts as a trap. You just throw it back on your compost pile the next day, and there you go.

Josh Clark (46:48)

All right.

Chuck Bryant (46:49)

Some people do say you, you. Some people still use pesticides. If you're. If you're organic, you use ferric phosphate, which, it interrupts their ability to digest, so they die of starvation in a few days. There's another one called metaldehyde that is hardcore stuff. It. It desiccates them. They end up dehydrating to death. And it's banned in the EU because they consider it unacceptably harmful to birds and mammals.

Josh Clark (47:21)

Of course it is.

Chuck Bryant (47:22)

Here in the US you can use it as much as you like.

Josh Clark (47:25)

Of course you can.

Chuck Bryant (47:25)

And they use it for the giant African land snail in particular, because, again, metaldehyde is hardcore stuff. And it turns out that the giant African land snail is. Hardcore snail.

Josh Clark (47:36)

Yeah, it's a hardcore snail, obviously would be a invasive species here in North America. These are the big ones, the one that looked like a bunny, I thought. They can be eight inches long. They eat more than 500 species of plant. They will eat everything in their paths, including in Florida. They're a real problem in Florida. Apparently, they will eat the stucco off your house to get more calcium. And they can pass disease along to people and animals.

Chuck Bryant (48:08)

Yeah, rat lungworm.

Josh Clark (48:10)

Yeah, meningitis. I've seen that. They can carry a host of parasites or they can host a host of parasites, some of which is good for the snail because it keeps animals from eating them. So it's like a defense mechanism. But that can be harmful to people at times as well.

Chuck Bryant (48:31)

Yeah, yeah. You don't want rat lungworm. Like you said, it can create meningitis in humans. So it's best to not really handle snails with your bare hands. And especially don't eat the snail alive from your garden. That's a really bad idea.

Josh Clark (48:45)

Yeah. But people actually collect, and I'm not sure if that's how they got here, but people collect these, you know, as an illegal pet, these giant African land snails.

Chuck Bryant (48:55)

That's my understanding that they were imported as illegal pets, at least to South Florida.

Josh Clark (49:01)

Are people doing.

Chuck Bryant (49:02)

I don't know, but they Also have been have shown up in some other places, including Hawaii and Polynesia. And somehow they got from Florida to these places probably through the illegal pet trade. And so in just typical human fashion in the 50s, people said, well, wait, there's this snail called a rosy wolf snail, and it's a predator. It's a little literal snail predator. Let's just import a bunch of them to take care of this giant African land snail, because I'm sure nothing will possibly go wrong because of this plan. It's foolproof. And that's what they did. And as a result, Hawaii has lost almost all of its native snail species in the wild, because the rosy wolf snail was like, I'd just rather eat these other kinds of snails and leave the giant African snail alone.

Josh Clark (49:53)

Yeah. These things are pretty creepy, though. I imagine there's got to be some kind of Nat Geo video of the wolf snail following its prey, because for a snail, they're moving pretty fast when they're tracking something. They go double to triple their normal speed. They will go up a tree after something. They will go underwater after something for a little while until they need to come up. It seems like they're just tenacious little fellows and they will go after something until they catch it.

Chuck Bryant (50:26)

Yeah. And they like to swallow other snails whole, including their shell. And there's a malacologist named Harry G. Lee who dissected a rosy wolf snail and found 13 other snail's shells in its gut.

Josh Clark (50:40)

Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot. It's like in a Louisiana state license plate.

Chuck Bryant (50:46)

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, you don't want these things on your beautiful pristine island. And once you bring them in, they're going to cause all sorts of problems. And that's what that goodbye snail video was about. It's definitely worth watching. But the rosy wolf snail is definitely considered invasive. And what I didn't know, Chuck, is the common garden snail, the one we're so familiar with, is considered invasive in the United States. Cornu aspersum. Poof. That is the common garden snail. And it was originally imported in because it was the one that used to be escargot. And some of them escaped from farms and set up shop in the wild. And now it's called the common garden snail because it became so prolific.

Josh Clark (51:31)

Yeah. And they don't know when people started eating escargot. And I think escargot is. Is the French name for that edible snail and also doubles as the name of the dish.

Chuck Bryant (51:44)

Right? Yeah. Yeah. I think you're Right, like french fries.

Josh Clark (51:46)

I think it's both. Yeah. But, you know, people like this stuff. It was always, you know, growing up, you always heard about escargot was like this, you know, sort of as a kid, the first fancy, weird food you'd

Chuck Bryant (52:00)

heard of, probably like, do the wealthy have no bounds kind of thing.

Josh Clark (52:06)

Exactly. And then, you know, we've got all signs. Should we finish up with just a bunch of kind of cool factoids?

Chuck Bryant (52:13)

Yeah, for sure.

Josh Clark (52:14)

Well, jewelry. Snail shells have always or have long been used as jewelry for humans. It's some of the oldest known human jewelry. They found this stuff like necklaces and stuff made of sea snail shells that date back like at least 120,000 years.

Chuck Bryant (52:32)

That's nuts, man.

Josh Clark (52:33)

Yeah. What else?

Chuck Bryant (52:35)

The author, Patricia Highsmith, who is a very interesting person in her own right, she wrote Strangers on a Train and the Talented Mr. Ripley novels. She was a snail pal. Like the snail wrangler in that video that I talked about. And like the snail wrangler in that video that I talked about, she would go out in public with her snails as companions. There's a story of Patricia Highsmith at a party who was revealed to have dozens of snails in her purse who she brought so she'd have someone to talk to her snail friends.

Josh Clark (53:06)

Yeah, how about that?

Chuck Bryant (53:08)

How about that? That's what snail people do, is that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Clark (53:12)

This is really interesting is they've been studying how snails might help us figure out Alzheimer's disease from what I found is they've, you know, we've talked about Alzheimer's before, which is when you have these amyloid plaque buildup or plaques, I guess, that build up on the brain tissue. And they don't exactly know how it causes memory loss, but this is what they're trying to figure out with the snail. These plaques are formed from a protein called amyloid beta, which we've talked about, or a beta, and they have taken a beta and put it on otherwise very healthy pond snails. I have no idea why they chose, like, why they thought the pond snail was a good candidate to begin with.

Chuck Bryant (53:55)

That's a terrible lobbying group.

Josh Clark (53:57)

Maybe that's what it is. But they put this abetta on these healthy pond snails, and within 24 hours, they show evidence that they have harmed their memory, basically. But the finding is that they haven't found any damage to the brain tissue, like no cell loss, no brain tissue damage at all. So basically what they have, sort of the result of all that is that a beta by itself can trigger the Memory loss. And it's not from damage to the brain or a deterioration of the brain

Chuck Bryant (54:30)

or the plaque buildup, Right?

Josh Clark (54:32)

Yeah, exactly. They think it's like a specific pathway for memory that's being damaged and not the brain itself.

Chuck Bryant (54:39)

Thank you. Pond snails.

Josh Clark (54:40)

I know, it's amazing.

Chuck Bryant (54:42)

I also saw it goes the other way, too, that the common garden snail's mucus has been found to be bioactive as an anti inflammatory, antioxidant and anti apoptic, which means it prevents cell death.

Josh Clark (54:55)

Oh, wow.

Chuck Bryant (54:56)

So they think that they're figuring out how to turn that into a drug to treat Alzheimer's, too. So snails are just coming at us with the one, two punch to battle Alzheimer's disease.

Josh Clark (55:06)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (55:07)

God bless.

Josh Clark (55:08)

I love it.

Chuck Bryant (55:08)

Speaking of God bless them, if you're subscribed to the West African Yoruba religion, you would say God bless the snail because they're associated with Obatala, the sky father, as well as the Orishas, collective deities to whom the land snail, the giant African land snail in particular, is sacred.

Josh Clark (55:28)

I gotta read this last thing. This is the only last thing I got.

Chuck Bryant (55:31)

Okay.

Josh Clark (55:31)

This Nigerian snail recipe.

Chuck Bryant (55:34)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (55:35)

I'm not into eating snails. They call this Congo meat. It's got red pepper, habaneros, garlic, onion, and then it's seasoned with cayenne and ground crayfish.

Chuck Bryant (55:49)

Yeah. You lost me at habanero. But it does sound extremely interesting. I would try it. I'd just be like, can you leave the habanero out?

Josh Clark (55:56)

Too hot.

Chuck Bryant (55:57)

Too hot?

Josh Clark (55:58)

Yeah. Too hot for the hot tub.

Chuck Bryant (56:00)

Yeah. Too hot for tv. So I've got one more thing, Chuck.

Josh Clark (56:05)

Let's hear it.

Chuck Bryant (56:07)

There is a weird thing that started popping up at the end of the 13th century in Northern France. If you look through illuminated manuscripts, meaning manuscripts that have the doodles in the margins and all that. Like a Mad magazine.

Josh Clark (56:22)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (56:22)

You will start to notice there are pictures of knights battling giant snails.

Josh Clark (56:28)

Oh, yeah. That's so interesting.

Chuck Bryant (56:30)

And they. It lasted for like 100 or so years, is like, a trend. It actually came back again for a little while in the 15th century. And no one has any idea what they were trying to say. One of the theories is that it was just hilarious that it was meant as, like, kind of comic relief. While you're reading, like, this kind of heavy text or whatever, you just look over and you're like, that's a knight battling a snake. Snail, Right?

Josh Clark (56:51)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (56:52)

Other people say that snails symbolize something like superhuman strength because they carry their house on their back. I kind of poo poo. That one. I like this. The comic relief one.

Josh Clark (57:02)

And people are just like, hey, this is funny. Look at this. This knight's fighting a snail.

Chuck Bryant (57:06)

Yeah, this will be good for a laugh, said the medieval monk.

Josh Clark (57:09)

Very interesting.

Chuck Bryant (57:10)

I say so, too. So if you want to know more about snails, everybody, go forth. Research them. You could do worse than watching the Strange and Wonderful world of the Sea snail wrangler. And goodbye, snails. And if you see a snail in your garden, and especially if it's not doing anything to harm things, you just tip your hat to it and say, good day, snail. You could be as much as 5 to 10 years old.

Josh Clark (57:33)

That's right.

Chuck Bryant (57:34)

Chuck said, that's right. This means it's time for listener mail.

Josh Clark (57:40)

Yeah, we're gonna do a correction. I wish we could get this one out sooner because we're gonna continue, continue to get emails about the great isotope ion.

Chuck Bryant (57:50)

My goodness.

Josh Clark (57:51)

Issue, which I didn't know was an issue. We got a lot of them, but this is from nick Lufty, a PhD student at UC Irvine. And Nick is getting a PhD in Quantum Chemistry.

Chuck Bryant (58:07)

Oh, wow, man. I want to hang out with you, Nick.

Josh Clark (58:12)

And Nick listens with his wife, Dinah.

Chuck Bryant (58:16)

Hey, Dinah.

Josh Clark (58:17)

And said, can't wait till we're in town for a show. But if you're at Irvine, I mean, Irvine. How far is that from San Francisco?

Chuck Bryant (58:24)

I have no idea.

Josh Clark (58:25)

I mean, it's in the state of California, so it's gotta just be like an hour away, right?

Chuck Bryant (58:29)

Exactly. Yeah. Everything in California is an hour away.

Josh Clark (58:31)

Come see us. Hey, guys. Wanted to offer a slight correction about the periodic table.

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Josh Clark (58:37)

When you mention the different weighted averages being a result of different isotopes, you mentioned that it is the loss or gain of an electron that constitutes the different isotopes. This is actually incorrect. What you've defined is an ion, not an isotope. It is the varying number of neutrons that makes up the different flavors of isotopes. This is the thing that makes carbon dating possible. Love that episode, by the way. Last thing, guys. Chemistry as a whole is a very inaccessible branch of stem. I hated it. I failed my first chemistry class, and one day our professor was out sick and the chair of the chem department came to sub in and she implored us to get a PhD in chemistry. I said to myself, she must be nuts. Here I am ten years later, and I am clearly the one who was nuts. The long and short of this last bit is to never give up on science.

Chuck Bryant (59:28)

Nice.

Josh Clark (59:29)

And that, again, is from Nick. I think it said Lufty but it's actually lufty.

Chuck Bryant (59:35)

Okay. Like Chipotle or Chipotle.

Josh Clark (59:39)

Yeah, that's right.

Chuck Bryant (59:40)

Thanks a lot, Nick. We'll call him Nick L from now on. Yeah, that was a great one. So everybody who wrote in to let us know, we appreciate you for doing that because we like to get things right and that was definitely a slip up and it is something that we needed to correct for sure. So good job, Chuck, picking that one.

Josh Clark (59:57)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (59:58)

Well, if you want to get in touch with us and let us know we got something wrong or we got something right, or tell us something about yourself or your dog or your pet goat, doesn't matter. You can send it via email to stuff podcastheartradio.com

Josh Clark (60:14)

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Josh Clark (62:00)

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.