How to watch a snail
Wet ground, failing light, and a minute of stillness. Handling is usually the part that teaches you the least.
Volume I
Notes on a slow animal
Snails keep to the damp edge of a garden: under a pot, along a wall, out only when the air is wet enough. This journal is a set of field notes on how they are built, where they live, and how to watch them without taking them home.
Snails in myth, medicine, and the kitchen
Farmed snails are food. Wild snails from a baited garden are not. The spiral is real geometry, and it is not required to be Fibonacci.
Keeping a pet snail
One common, legal, local snail in a damp box with a tight lid. Not a rare species, and not a release at the end of term.
Snails that arrive uninvited
Eggs in potting soil and juveniles on nursery plants travel farther than any snail crawls. One fertilized animal can be enough.
Who eats snails
Thrushes use anvil stones. Beetles, ducks, and glow-worm larvae have their own methods. Poison is the predator that does not stop at the snail.
What snails eat
Seedlings, algae, rotting leaves, and lime from a wall. A garden snail is a grazer with a wide definition of a meal.
Partula and the wolf snail
A predator introduced to eat one snail ate another. The Partula of the Pacific islands are the record of that mistake.
Cone snails
A cone shell can be a venomous animal with a harpoon. If it might be alive, it stays on the reef.
Apple snails and the pink eggs
Bright pink egg masses above the waterline belong to apple snails. In the wrong wetland they are the next generation of an invasion.
The giant African land snail
Lissachatina fulica is a large, regulated, and destructive traveler. A mercy release is how the next infestation starts.