How Snails Work

SPEAKER_11: If your business needs a new application, then developers will have to write code. A lot of code. If an application needs to be modernized, then you'll need time, resources, and caffeine. If that sounds daunting, then you need Watson X Code Assistant. AI designed to multiply developer productivity so you can generate code quickly. Let's create a more modern foundation for business with Watson X Code Assistant. Learn more at ibm.com slash code assistant. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_03: You know, in today's world, it seems the best treatment is reserved only for a few. Well, Discover wants to change that by making everyone feel special. That's why, with your Discover card, you'll have access to 24x7 live customer service as well as $0 fraud liability, which means you're never held responsible for unauthorized purchases. Finally, no matter who you are or where you are in life, you'll feel special with Discover. SPEAKER_10: Learn more at discover.com slash credit card. Limitations apply. SPEAKER_11: We'll be right back. SPEAKER_03: Hey, and welcome to Slowcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. SPEAKER_03: We're just inching along, doing things our own way, our own speed, our own time, leaving a trail of mucus behind us as we do. Wow. Inching along 0.5 inches per second. Yeah. It's like that one guy said. SPEAKER_11: Life is a highway. I want to ride it all night long, covering only an inch. SPEAKER_03: Was that the parenthetical of that title? Yeah. It was like you had to read between the lines. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, exactly. What a great song. Or play it backwards. That song, do you think is great? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I do. I do. If you take away all the bluh, bluh, bluh, it's actually a great song. SPEAKER_11: It's very upbeat and enthusiastic and very, it's just a good song. SPEAKER_03: Who was that? 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, SPEAKER_03: and now everybody's going to be mad at us. Yeah, that happens a lot. We'll find out. But anyway, whoever you are out there who made that song, if you're listening, SPEAKER_03: brittan cap off to you. That's right. Chuck, I picked this one. He is Canadian, by the way. I knew it, dude. I knew it. How does that always happen? SPEAKER_11: I don't know. I don't know. What's his name? SPEAKER_03: Tom Cochran. I wanted to say Tom, but I wanted to say Tom Brokaw, and I was like, I'm not even going to bring that up. SPEAKER_03: And you know what? He's in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. SPEAKER_11: Oh my God. Sorry, Tom. SPEAKER_03: All right, so much for that. Okay. At any rate, hats off Tom Cochran, I think is what I was trying to say, right? SPEAKER_11: So we're doing an episode on snails, which I'm kind of psyched about. SPEAKER_03: Our new good friend Allison helped us with this one. SPEAKER_03: I believe this is her second one. She's doing great. Yeah, was this a listener recommendation? No, this was a Josh recommendation. 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. SPEAKER_11: 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. Not a single one of those kids came up with the idea of snails. It was really sad. Kids these days. They don't even know what snails are. Snails, that was my pick, and I'm not sure where it came from. SPEAKER_03: I think I just pulled it out of my head. SPEAKER_11: But I'm glad I did, because this is one of those things where, I mean, snails are everywhere. SPEAKER_03: 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. And 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. 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. Mm-hmm. SPEAKER_11: And there was one picture of a woman holding one of these things. Yeah. And I swear it looked like a bunny rabbit with a turtle shell. SPEAKER_11: Weird. I have not seen that picture. SPEAKER_11: It looked like a bunny. I mean, it's a snail, clearly. It didn't look that much like a bunny. Right. SPEAKER_03: I wasn't like, what in the world? Maybe it was eating a bunny. SPEAKER_11: Is that what it was? 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. SPEAKER_11: So there just tend to be more people studying, you know, furrier, cuter things than snails, I guess. 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. SPEAKER_03: They're part of gastropoda. And it's not just snails and gastropoda. We're talking slugs, sea slugs, conchs, whelks, limpets. Basically, all snail-like creatures are in the gastropoda class. So they're gastropodes? Yeah, or gastropods. Okay. I didn't know how it was pronounced, so I'm just reading. It's got to be gastropod, right? I mean, I think it's gastropod, but would it be gastropoda? SPEAKER_03: No. SPEAKER_11: Or is it one of those weird things that just flips when you shorten it? It's that second thing. SPEAKER_11: Okay. Great. So I said also, Chuck, just living on Earth, you're aware of snails, and there's a reason for that. SPEAKER_03: They've been around for a really, really long time. SPEAKER_03: 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. 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, plus also some of them have evolved to like really hang on to their water better than other times so they can survive in the desert. SPEAKER_11: It's just nuts. SPEAKER_03: They're everywhere. And as a matter of fact, they think that there's about 150,000 gastropod species in total. And 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 in 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. 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. SPEAKER_11: But there are snails that live exclusively in the water under the sea. SPEAKER_11: 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 mucusy trail on the sidewalk. Right. Like we could probably get through 34,000 species today, but definitely not 35,000. That's right. SPEAKER_03: So we're not going to try. 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. SPEAKER_03: And there's 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 exists 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. 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. SPEAKER_11: 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. Yeah. Leave the snails alone. You read them? I have like once or twice. I'm not crazy about them. No, I'm not an escargot fan. SPEAKER_11: I'm a fan of the escargot joke though. SPEAKER_03: Right. Which is, look at that escargot. Is that what it was? A snail painted an S on the side of his car. SPEAKER_11: That's right. That's a great elementary school kid joke. Yep. That's wonderful. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_11: And I think there was a little tiny tong involved. Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. 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. 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. SPEAKER_03: Right. I'd rather have a deviled egg. You can also eat snail eggs. They call it white caviar. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. There's a, I think it's like 130 bucks for about 1.75 ounces. SPEAKER_11: SPEAKER_11: Wow. Wow. Well, that's a lot of snail eggs now that I think about it. Yeah, that seems like it. I mean, it looks like it comes a little tin like caviar, but although I do love caviar now, I don't think I would try snail caviar. SPEAKER_11: Okay. Okay. I'll accept that answer. I know I talked about a newish to caviar just the past couple of years, so it wasn't something I ever had until semi recently. SPEAKER_03: But now you have it at dinner every night. SPEAKER_11: You've heard of avocado toast? Every morning I just have caviar toast spread all over the biggest piece of sourdough I can. SPEAKER_03: With gold flakes on top. SPEAKER_11: All right. Should we talk about the body of a snail? 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah. I mean, we can talk about their shell for a little bit. SPEAKER_03: They have that. Well, we'll talk about the shell kind of throughout. It's obviously a protective device. SPEAKER_11: A 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 front door basically. It's a temporary front door that they can put on the whole of that shell. SPEAKER_11: 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. 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. SPEAKER_03: Oh, on the epigram? Yeah. It's like those reverse tire damage things at like a car rental parking lot. It's like that from what I understand. SPEAKER_11: 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. SPEAKER_11: Right. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the misconceptions of how the snail body is arranged if we can. Let's do it. SPEAKER_03: Inside that shell is the actual body of the snail. What we see as the head and 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? A single foot. 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 did you say covers the opening? I think it's called an epigram. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. I've been saying epigram. Epi-phram as in diaphragm. Epi-phram. Okay, gotcha. So what the epi-phram covers is called the aperture. And on land snails, there's one aperture. There's one way in, one way out. SPEAKER_11: 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 outside atmosphere. SPEAKER_03: 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. 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, Chubby Checker was going to call his dance the torsion and he's like, this doesn't have the right ring. Let's do the torsion. Right. And a 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. SPEAKER_03: That's pretty good. Did you think of that one beforehand? No. Oh, okay. No, I didn't. I've just gotten that good this late in the year. SPEAKER_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? SPEAKER_11: Yeah, we can at least touch on it. Sure. It's almost impenetrable if you're not a malacologist. 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 a you know, you can find a fossil of a shell, but the torsion is happening within the shell. SPEAKER_11: So you can't really tell if it's been torsioned. Is that even a verb? I don't know. I was going to say tordid. I didn't look it up, though. So I think tordid, right? Let's say tordid. Yeah, I think it's tordid. So you can't really tell if it's been tordid by looking at a fossil. And so there's just been a lot of debate. Like obviously this happened for a reason. SPEAKER_11: 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. 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 hindquarters, their tails, all that stuff from being bitten by a predator. SPEAKER_03: That one makes sense. 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 rotational hypothesis, the one that's been around since like 1929, and it basically says that at some point in the past, the snail, some snail mutant came along and twisted around during its development. And it became naturally selective 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 can retract the head because it's all it had to retract. Yeah, but that was just like a spontaneous thing, right? 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. SPEAKER_11: SPEAKER_03: 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 clearly, it could have happened as a mutation. It obviously did. But why would it have been naturally selected for hundreds of millions of years, which strongly implies that it was an advantageous mutation? Yeah, I would think so, right? Yeah. So that's kind of like this debate that's going on that is, I mean, you really have to understand snail anatomy and evolutionary history to go much further in understanding that debate. SPEAKER_03: That's pretty much what I could glean from the whole thing. 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I would steer clear. Just take a break, have another drink, and just relax. Yeah. Or maybe it's time for you to go home. Right. Yeah, get a car to take you home, or walk, or whatever. SPEAKER_11: Yeah. So that's the thing. SPEAKER_03: Just be very careful. Snails tort, and we're not sure exactly why, but what we do know, the upshot of it, is that their body is doubled back on itself and their anus and their head are essentially right next to each other. SPEAKER_03: Yes, exactly. They also have a mouth, and inside that mouth is something called a radula. It has teeth on it, and it's kind of like a tongue. SPEAKER_11: 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. 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. SPEAKER_03: 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? That's pretty cool. I love it. And there's also the mantle, and the mantle will come up quite a bit. And the best I can 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? SPEAKER_11: 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 snail, because it holds all the organs in place. SPEAKER_03: But it also does something really important. It secretes all of the stuff that eventually is built into the shell itself. That's right. So, are we at the shell part, do you think? 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. SPEAKER_03: Okay. SPEAKER_11: And we'll be right back after this. I'm Lauren Brad Pacheco, host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. SPEAKER_05: SPEAKER_09: Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear their firsthand stories of struggle and perseverance on their quest for answers. During the day, I'd feel like I'm just getting sick. I'd sort of have that fluish feeling, and then the next morning, I'd be fine. Then he started getting nodules on his body. He had been to so many different doctors, and I just felt like they were just throwing a dart at what this could be and trying different medications. SPEAKER_01: You couldn't imagine that anyone could be alive and have a mutation in that gene. Listen to Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, let's talk about Squarespace. Squarespace has an amazing new feature called Fluid Engine. It's a next generation website design system from Squarespace only, and it makes it easier than ever for anybody to unlock unbreakable creativity. You start with a best-in-class website design template from Squarespace, and you customize every design detail you want with the reimagined drag-and-drop technology, which anybody can use, and you can use it on desktop or mobile. SPEAKER_11: So stretch your imagination online with Squarespace's Fluid Engine, built-in and ready to go on any new Squarespace site. Go to squarespace.com slash stuff and get a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code STUFF to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. SPEAKER_03: Squarespace. What's your reason for wanting to be healthy? Is it because of your job or because your kids depend on you for everything? Is it because you just want to feel your best and live life to the fullest? Everyone has their own reason for wanting to be healthy, and those are the exact reasons why Teladoc Health was created. That's right. Simply stated, Teladoc Health relieves the burden of getting sick. It gives you access to doctors and nurses 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, all from the comfort of your own home. With Teladoc Health, you can connect with a board-certified doctor who will help diagnose your issue, provide a treatment plan, and even write a prescription if needed. Yeah, Teladoc Health is not only convenient, it's affordable too, and it's covered by a surprising number of insurance plans. It's always important to stay on top of your health. For more information, visit teladochealth.com slash what's your why. That's T-E-L-A-D-O-C health dot com slash what's your why. All right, so we promised to talk to you a little bit about the shell. A snail shell is beautiful. SPEAKER_11: 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. Right. 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. SPEAKER_11: 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 the outer edge of a snail shell will be much more sort of breakable than the inside harder part. That makes sense. So the oldest part is the – close to the center. Yeah. Apparently 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? Yeah. They're born like little tiny baby snails, like that preformationism theory from our things we used to believe before the scientific method episode. SPEAKER_03: That's right. So I also said, Chuck, the mantle holds – the mantle tissue holds all 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 breathe using kind of like a primitive – I don't want to say lung. SPEAKER_11: SPEAKER_03: I think that's kind of a stretch, but basically they have an opening that – It's called a lung. I've seen it called a lung in diagrams. Okay. So I've also seen it called a pneumostome. And it's essentially a breathing port that they can open and close using their muscles that takes in air and exhales air. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And they can – if you were 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. Yeah. So one of the things snails are most famous for is their mucus, right? SPEAKER_11: Yeah. 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. SPEAKER_03: For one, it allows the snail to do some Spiderman-esque moves, like just crawl right up the side of a building because it's very strong. It's glue-like. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. It can be – it's funny because it can be glue-like or act as a lubricant. Exactly. Which is pretty remarkable. Yeah. So, yeah, it also separates the snail from the rest of the world that it's running over. Yeah. 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. SPEAKER_03: And it also keeps the moisture locked inside, so much so that snail mucin, 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. Yeah. I mean, that's what keeps the – I mean, that and other things is what keeps that snail moist. So, if it's keeping the snail alive, then imagine what it can do for your crow's feet. Exactly. 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. SPEAKER_11: It's, you know, 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, you know, as a stand-in for other things at times. So, yeah, for sure. So, one of the other things that the snail trail, the mucus trail does is it says, hey, sailor, come this way. Right. Because it's one way that snails find one another to mate, which is surprising that they mate because they're hermaphroditic. They – all snails, or most species of land snails, are equipped with both male and female sex organs. SPEAKER_03: 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. 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 you – if like a male had to search for a female or the other way around. SPEAKER_11: So, they basically just double their chances of finding somebody within the, you know, 10 feet or so that they're wandering around. I mean, they move more than that within a lifetime, obviously. But, you know, if it's that time of year, which is what, like autumn? Sure. Autumn and spring. Autumn and spring. They're going to wander around. They're going to find another snail. They're going to dance around each other, and that just means very slowly circle each other for – I saw four to six hours. SPEAKER_05: SPEAKER_11: I saw the whole thing can take up to 12 hours. It's a very – obviously, as you would imagine, a very slow process. It is slow, but it's really involved. Like, they are really into it while they're going at it. 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 steamed. They're touching tentacles. They're biting each other's lips. Things are getting really pretty hot and heavy in there. SPEAKER_03: And then they have something that is amazing, and I don't know of any other animal that has something like this. SPEAKER_11: 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. SPEAKER_11: Sure. 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, you know, within the week you want to go at it again, you can still do that. SPEAKER_11: It's not necessary for reproduction, but it helps in reproduction. They form in the dart sack and is stored in a dart sack, and if you look at it, it's a little – it 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. Oh, I imagine it like – and then just sailing a couple feet and then sproing. SPEAKER_11: 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, SPEAKER_03: but it can pierce organs. It can go all the way through the head and out the other side. SPEAKER_11: So it's really crazy. It's a weird adaptation. 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 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. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. It's like a really clumsy, superfluous extra step that, like you said, doesn't even – like 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 process that they get involved in. SPEAKER_03: And then the sex itself is like just one rubs its foot against the other foot, and there you go. Right, and they say, who's pregnant? And they go, I don't know, maybe both of us. Yeah, both of us. Actually, can it be both? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Both can walk away with fertilized eggs after this. 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? SPEAKER_11: In the gestation period, it can be like really short, right? SPEAKER_11: 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah. And once those little guys are born, they may immediately start eating the rest of the eggs as their first meal. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it's kind of a bummer, especially because leading up to it, it's so cute. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_11: Sometimes it'll eat smaller siblings that have already hatched, not just the eggs. SPEAKER_03: What I didn't realize, though, is that some – and that's actually not all snail species. That's ones that will eat eggs, but for the most part, they'll eat just vegetation. Yeah. The snail parent will often stay nearby to provide protection for the young snail hatchlings for a little while. Yeah, they hang out for a while, right? Yeah. I did not realize that, which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah, they can hang out for up to three months together while the parents are kind of protecting them. SPEAKER_03: And like you said, they're born with that little baby shell, and it just gets bigger and bigger. Did we talk about how long they can live? No, we didn't. It's pretty spectacular. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, in the wild, they can live up to five years, which that shocked me, quite frankly. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it really makes you feel bad for all those snails you've accidentally stepped on after a rainy evening. I know. You hope at least they were old. Yeah, exactly, like they had their time. 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, there's a really great little short documentary called The Strange and Wonderful World of the Snail Wrangler. SPEAKER_11: It's on YouTube, and it's about this woman who takes photos of her snail friends in like little miniature settings, human settings. SPEAKER_11: It's really cute. And she talks about one of her snail companions that she's been with for like ten years. SPEAKER_03: 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 ten 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. They're not just these anonymous, generic animals running around. I mean, anything that lives that long, there's just something more substantial to it than you would think initially. Are you saying a snail has a soul? I think it's pretty clear, yes. All right. So snails are doing their things. I love this account that Allison found that 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. SPEAKER_11: 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. SPEAKER_11: So even though there are snails in the desert, you're mainly going to find snails in more moist areas. We're going to say that word quite a bit. I apologize. Okay, I was going to say, unlike humans, moist is a snail's favorite word. 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. SPEAKER_03: They're pretty active at night because things can get wetter overnight, as we know, like when you wake up with like morning dew and stuff like that. SPEAKER_11: 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. Yeah, and as we'll see that they run afoul of gardeners for that reason. SPEAKER_11: But just hold your horses, gardeners, put 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 are in charge of like recycling plant matter, decaying stuff. SPEAKER_03: 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. 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. SPEAKER_11: That's very important. 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. Yeah, pretty crazy. I had no idea that they were pollinators. It just makes them even more important. You know what I mean? SPEAKER_03: Totally. SPEAKER_11: 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? Let's do it. I'm Lauren Brecht-Pacheco, host of Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. SPEAKER_03: Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear their firsthand stories of what they've done. SPEAKER_03: And we're here to help you find the right people. SPEAKER_05: And we're here to help you find the right people. And we're here to help you find the right people. Every other week, we get to know the everyday people living with a mysterious illness and hear their firsthand stories of what they've done. SPEAKER_09: During the day, I'd feel like I'm just getting sick. I'd sort of have that flu-ish feeling and then the next morning I'd be fine. Then he started getting nodules on his body. He had been to so many different doctors and I just felt like they were just throwing a dart at what this could be and trying different medications. SPEAKER_00: You couldn't imagine that anyone could be alive and have a mutation in that gene. Listen to Symptomatic, a medical mystery podcast, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_06: This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by National Car Rental. SPEAKER_09: National knows the way we all work has changed. Business can happen from virtually anywhere now. SPEAKER_03: But that said, there's nothing like being there. That's right. And when you need to put the power of business travel to work, those that know go with National. Because when you rent from National as a member of their complimentary Emerald Club, you don't have to stop at the counter. You can just fly right on by and head directly to the lot. Yeah, and there you can choose any car in the aisle you want, even upgrades, and still just pay the reserved midsize rate. Then manage everything right from the app. They're giving you speed, choice, and the control to get more done. SPEAKER_11: So go National and go like a pro. Learn more at NationalCar.com, subject to availability and other restrictions. Hey friends, did you know that it's estimated that 85% of all customer service interactions are automated? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's true. And customers are the lifeblood of all business. So you probably don't want to put that responsibility in the hands of a robot. And that's why thousands of business owners call Ruby and hire them. That's right, Ruby is the virtual receptionist company who screens, transfers, and takes messages 24-7 all while making your customers feel special. Yep, you definitely don't want to hire a subpar front desk person. And with Ruby, they engage with your callers in a conversational way, just like your best employee would. SPEAKER_02: That's right, finding someone who cares about your business as much as you do feels impossible at times. But the team at Ruby are experts in providing the best customer experience and turn every ring into a relationship. Yep, this year can be your best year yet. Small, efficient changes can make a huge impact on your bottom line. That's right, and Ruby answers all of your calls live from right here in the US. They'll take messages, answer questions, route calls, and much more. Visit Ruby.com, or better yet, give them a call at 844-900-RUBY. SPEAKER_03: So, one thing that we said earlier, Chuck, was that snails run afoul of gardeners. And the reason why is because they will eat a lot of plants. The burgundy snail, also known as the Roman snail, the one that's mostly used for escargot these days, SPEAKER_03: they weigh 20 grams-ish as an adult, but they'll eat 6 grams of plant matter in a day. SPEAKER_03: 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 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 you basically want to leave the snails alone as much as possible. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, there is some information here that Alison got from the Royal Horticultural Society in Britain. And they say, you know, don't use chemical pesticides, please. Like, if you want to get rid of your snails, you can try and do so naturally by introducing predators. I guess, you know, throw a bunch of garden beetles out there and see what happens. Just say whoever walks out of here alive is, you know, deserves to live. It's like the thunderdome. SPEAKER_11: Exactly. Two enter, one leaves. SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, if you're bored, just go ahead and build a small-scale replica of the thunderdome and put the snail and the beetle in. SPEAKER_11: You sicko. 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. That was a great impression, by the way, Chuck. SPEAKER_03: Thank you. In addition to putting them in a deathmatch 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. The thing is, you – SPEAKER_03: Put them in your neighbor's garden? Yeah, exactly. Especially if they're a jerk hosta grower. It will really drive them crazy. SPEAKER_03: 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 just basically acts as a trap. You just throw it back on your compost pile the next day and there you go. SPEAKER_03: All right. Some people do say you – some people still use pesticides. Of course. 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 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. Of course it is. Here in the U.S., you can use it as much as you like. Of course you can. 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it's a hardcore snail. Obviously, it would be an invasive species here in North America. These are the big ones, the ones that look like a bunny, I thought. They can be eight inches long. SPEAKER_11: 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. SPEAKER_11: And they can pass disease along to people and animals. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, rat lungworm. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, meningitis. I see 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. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_11: 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. SPEAKER_03: That's my understanding that they were imported as illegal pets, at least to South Florida. SPEAKER_11: What in the world are people doing? SPEAKER_03: I don't know. But they also 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 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 than leave the giant African snail alone. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, these things are pretty creepy, though. I imagine there's got to be some kind of Nat Geo video of the wolf snail, like, you know, 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 fellas, and they will go after something until they catch it. SPEAKER_03: 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 snails' shells in its gut. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot. It's like in a Louisiana state license plate. SPEAKER_03: 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 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, and they don't know when people started eating escargot. And I think escargot is the French name for that edible snail and also doubles as the name of the dish. SPEAKER_03: Right, yeah, yeah, I think you're right, like French fries. SPEAKER_03: I think it's both. SPEAKER_11: 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 heard of probably. SPEAKER_03: Like do the wealthy have no bounds kind of thing? Right. SPEAKER_11: Exactly. And then, you know, we've got all kinds of – should we finish up with just a bunch of kind of cool factoids? Yeah, for sure. 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 the stuff, like necklaces and stuff, made of sea snail shells that date back like at least 120,000 years. SPEAKER_03: That's nuts, man. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what else? SPEAKER_03: The author Patricia Highsmith, who was 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, how about that? SPEAKER_03: How about that? That's what snail people do, is that kind of thing? Yeah. SPEAKER_11: This is really interesting, is they've been studying how snails might help us figure out Alzheimer's disease. From what I've 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 snails. These plaques are formed from a protein called amyloid beta, which we've talked about, or abeta. And they have taken abeta and put it on otherwise very healthy pond snails. SPEAKER_11: I have no idea why they chose, like why they thought the pond snail was a good candidate to begin with. They have a terrible lobbying group. Maybe that's what it is. But they put this abeta on these healthy pond snails, and within 24 hours, they show evidence that they have harmed their memory, basically. SPEAKER_11: 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, you know, the result of all that is that abeta by itself can trigger the memory loss, and it's not from like damage to the brain or like a deterioration of the brain. Or the plaque buildup, right? SPEAKER_11: Yeah, exactly. They think it's like a specific pathway for memory that's being damaged and not the brain itself. SPEAKER_03: SPEAKER_03: Man, thank you pond snails. SPEAKER_11: I know, it's amazing. SPEAKER_03: I also saw it goes the other way, too. 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. Oh, wow. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_04: Yeah. SPEAKER_03: God bless them. I love it. 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. SPEAKER_11: Wow. I got to read this last thing. This is the only last thing I got. Okay. This Nigerian snail recipe? SPEAKER_11: Yeah. 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. SPEAKER_03: 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? SPEAKER_11: Too hot. SPEAKER_03: Too hot. SPEAKER_11: Yeah. Too hot for the hot tub? SPEAKER_03: Yeah. SPEAKER_11: Too hot for TV. SPEAKER_03: Uh-huh. So I've got one more thing, Chuck. Let's hear it. 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 doodles in the margins and all that, like a magazine, SPEAKER_03: you will start to notice there are pictures of knights battling giant snails. SPEAKER_11: Oh, yeah. That's so interesting. SPEAKER_03: And it lasted for like 100 or so years. It's 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's 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 snail. SPEAKER_11: Right, yeah. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_11: And people are just like, hey, this is funny. Look at this. This knight's fighting a snail. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this will be good for a laugh, said the medieval monk. Very interesting. 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 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 five to ten years old. That's right. Chuck said that's right. That means it's time for listener mail. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, we're going to do a correction. I wish we could get this one out sooner because we're going to continue to get emails about the great isotope ion issue. My goodness. Which I didn't know was an issue. This is we a lot of them, but this is from Nick Lufti, a Ph.D. student at UC Irvine. And Nick is getting a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry. SPEAKER_03: Oh, wow. Man, I want to hang out with you, Nick. SPEAKER_11: And Nick listens with his wife, Dinah. Hey, Dinah. 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? SPEAKER_11: I have no idea. I mean, it's in the state of California, so it's got to just be like an hour away, right? SPEAKER_03: Exactly. Yeah, everything in California is an hour away. SPEAKER_11: Come see us. Hey, guys, wanted to offer a slight correction about the periodic table. Don't hate me. When you mentioned 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. SPEAKER_11: 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, 10 years later, and I am clearly the one who is nuts. The long and short of this last bit is to never give up on science. SPEAKER_03: Nice. SPEAKER_11: And that again is from Nick, I think it said Lufti, but it's actually Lutfi. Okay, like Chipotle or Chipotle. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right. 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. SPEAKER_11: Yeah. SPEAKER_03: 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 stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. SPEAKER_08: Stuff You 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. SPEAKER_03: G-A-R-T.com slash learn brought to you by Argenex. SPEAKER_13: Learn more about Visible Wireless and Visible's data management practices at Visible.com. Additional terms apply. So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night stay anywhere? Anywhere. What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris? Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby. Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad in Toulouse? Hilton Honors, baby. SPEAKER_12: What about the five star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you going to do this for all 7,000 hotels and resorts? SPEAKER_12: When you want points that can take you anywhere, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Click the banner to join Hilton Honors for free today.