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Snails

There's currently a snail genocide going on in my back garden.

I've been trying for months to grow some sunflowers but the little buggers just devour them in an instant. Once planted out the sunflowers don't last a single night! They won't touch the weeds, oh no, but with sunflowers it's like they're a pack of slowly-moving piranhas. After seeing my latest batch reduced to twigs I finally lost my temper and bought some slug pellets. Planted out some more sunflowers then scattered the pellets around them.

Went out the next day and it was a war zone. Literally twelve dead snails in a ring around the sunflower. They'd been climbing over the bodies of their dead comrades to try and reach it. Determined little buggers, I'll give them that.

If only they put this much enthusiasm into eating my weeds...
 
Fast moving snails spread deadly dog disease across UK
By Matt McGrath, Environment correspondent, BBC News
[Time-lapse footage of the snails moving]
Continue reading the main story

Despite their lethargic reputations, snails can travel at a relatively speedy one metre per hour, say researchers.
By attaching multicoloured LED lights, the scientists were able to track their movements over a 24-hour period.
The gastropods were fast enough to explore the length of an average UK garden in a single night.

But scientists are worried that the fast moving snails are spreading a parasite that is deadly for dogs.
Over the past few years the wet summers enjoyed across the UK have proved the ideal breeding grounds for snails.
According to the Royal Horticultural Society, their numbers increased by 50% last year.

As well as being a pest for gardeners, snails can also spread a parasite called Angiostrongylus vasorum.
This lungworm is a particular threat to dogs, which can become infected by accidentally eating slugs or snails which they come across in the garden or on dog toys.

To assess the scale of the threat, researchers at the University of Exeter decided to track the movements of snails in garden situations.
To do this they attached tiny, multicoloured LED lights to the backs of some 450 snails and used UV paint to track their movements.
The researchers found that the snails could cover distances up to 25 metres in a 24-hour period.
"They are so slow that people don't even think about them moving, but it turns out they do, and they can go a long way in a night," said Dr Dave Hodgson, who lead this study and was also involved in a BBC amateur science experiment in 2010 that sought to discover if snails had a homing instinct.

The researchers say their new work indicates that snails pose a growing threat to pets.
"They are not just lettuce munchers, they are carriers of parasites that can kill your dogs," said Dr Hodgson,
A recent survey of veterinary surgeons indicated that the lungworm parasite was now endemic across the UK, where once it was mainly found in the south.
"It is becoming a real problem not just in the south of England, it is moving north to Scotland," said Dr Hodgson.
"It is a national problem and we all have to pay attention to the interactions between dogs and snails," he said.

In the new work, the scientists were surprised to see so many snails followed the slimy trails laid by others. Dr Hodgson says it is all about conserving energy.
"We know that snails use about 40% of their energy budget producing slime.
"Given a chance, a snail will prefer to follow a trail that has been laid by another, it is a form of cheating like slipstreaming," he said. 8)

As to what pet owners should do, the scientists suggested they should regularly check the nooks and crannies in their gardens for snails and try to reduce exposure to the species.
"I wouldn't be too happy suggesting that there should be a snail apocalypse and everyone should get rid of them," said Dr Hodgson.
"I think awareness is a better idea, people need to understand the wildlife in their gardens and that no organism is totally harmless."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23798012
 
From the Bristish Library Medieval manuscripts blog:

Knight v Snail

Recently a group of us went into our manuscripts store to have a look at some medieval genealogical rolls. We were examining Royal MS 14 B V, an English roll from the last part of the 13th century which contains quite a lot of marginalia, when one of our post-medieval colleagues noticed a painting of a knight engaging in combat with a snail.

This struck him as odd, which struck the medievalists in the group as odd; surely everyone has seen this sort of thing before, right? As anyone who is familiar with 13th and 14th century illuminated manuscripts can attest, images of armed knights fighting snails are common, especially in marginalia. But the ubiquity of these depictions doesn’t make them any less strange, and we had a long discussion about what such pictures might mean.

There has been much scholarly debate about the significance of these depictions of snail combat...
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More here, including some nice illustrations and reference to a chap called the Comte de Bastard - which has to be good value in anyone's book.

I find the subject quite fascinating, because whereas quite a lot is known about medieval allegory (as anyone who's had to slog their weary way through Piers Plowman can probably tell you), as far as this image goes it seems that the experts are at a bit of a loss; there are quite a few theories, but no-one seems terribly sure.

For what it's worth I'm leaning towards a much simpler explanation possibly hinted at by Malcom Jones in The Secret Middle Ages*. (I'm not totally convinced by the Lombard one, which Jones also mentions later in the book.) The relevant entry is not about manuscripts, but about a carving in Bristol Cathedral of two men whipping a snail, and refers to folly. It's accompaned by two literary examples:

In effect it shall no more avayle
Than with a whype to dryfe a snayle
Click to expand...

and:

What can it avayle
To dryve forth a snayle...
Click to expand...

Maybe tilting at snails was an earlier, and slightly more leisurely, version of tilting at windmills.

I'm sure there's also reference to the subject in Michael Camille's, Image on the Edge, but the book has no index.

Incidentally, on a slight tangent Jones mentions another gastropod related fact I'd forgotten:

...it is important to realise that the distinction between slug and snail was not made in English before about 1700, so that writing in 1633, Bishop Hall could still say, 'See there two snails. One hath a house, the other wants it; yet both are snails.'
Click to expand...

Another short article on knight v snail from the Smithsonian, here.

*Not a Da Vinci Code type thing at all, whatever the title might suggest - more of an exploration of medieval life through the examination of contemporary objects of art that exist 'below' the radar of most books on the subject. Although Jones deliberately avoids the phrases 'popular art' and 'folk art' - mention of those things might help you kind of get the picture.
 
Reminds me a little of Brueghel's Netherlandish Proverbs.

We don't understand the sayings now but they were clear enough back then. Like the knight jousting with the snails - they meant something clear enough back then.

Anyway, it's obvious what the snails represent. Awesomeness. 8)
 
Are we crapping out of the same window here? :hmm:

(That's a slightly less vulgar version of the original Flemish saying, which I've only just realised is even ruder than I first thought. :oops: )
 
Heh! Heh!

Snails Are Dissolving in Pacific Ocean

Scarred. Researchers found that acidified ocean water appears to have pitted shells (inset) on pteropods collected along the U.S. West Coast.
NOAA

Scarred. Researchers found that acidified ocean water appears to have pitted shells (inset) on pteropods collected along the U.S. West Coast.

An increasingly acidified Pacific Ocean is dissolving the shells of tiny marine snails that live along North America’s western coast. The broad finding, which has surprised some researchers, suggests that sea life is already being affected by changes in the ocean’s chemistry caused by rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. ...
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014 ... ific-ocean
Click to expand...
 
Once their shells have dissolved completely, they'll just be slugs...
 
Specially for Scargie.

Snail trail: How to expel the gardener's biggest enemy

10 July 2014 by Stephanie Pain. Magazine issue 2977.

Video: Follow the trails of glow-in-the-dark snails

Nail varnish, correction fluid and disco lights have revealed the impressive homing instincts of garden snails, as well as the best ways to get rid of them

AFTER 15 years of neglect, David Dunstan decided to give his garden a makeover. Once he had finished clearing and digging, he splashed out on 120 new plants, from cottage-garden favourites like lupins and lavenders to showy hostas with their luxuriant foliage. With the plants dug in and watered, the solid-state-physicist from Queen Mary, University of London put his feet up and waited for nature to do its stuff.

It did – but not in the way Dunstan had anticipated. Within days the prized hostas had been reduced to outlines on the soil. The lupins were hardly recognisable. Wherever Dunstan looked, he saw tender young plants ravaged by the rasping tongues of snails.

What to do? Advice came thick and fast. Crush them underfoot. Drown them in traps baited with beer. Surround the young plants with a crunchy ring of ash or eggshells. Or there was the seemingly scientific solution: a barrier of copper, said to react with a snail's slimy secretions to give it a nerve-jangling shock. But unwilling to harm even the most annoying of his garden's wildlife, Dunstan opted for another tried-and-tested technique – lobbing the snails over the wall.

Later, discussing his decision in the pub, the consensus was: "Waste of time – they'll come back." According to gardening wisdom, snails can find their way home, even if it means crossing unfamiliar territory. His scientific curiosity piqued, Dunstan unearthed a bottle of typewriter correction fluid and started an experiment to find out if snail throwing helped protect his plants or simply improved his bowling technique. It's a pressing question for millions of gardeners, not least the 20 per cent who recently confessed in a UK survey to throwing snails into their neighbour's patch. ...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... 9F4UvldVsk
Click to expand...
 
I did warn y'all about the hostas. :twisted:

I read about the homing snails a while back. In this particular example, the snails'd had 15 years or so of freedom so they probably thought the new plants were a sort of nouveau cuisine laid on especially for them. I bet they were delighted. :lol:
 
escargot1 said:
I did warn y'all about the hostas. :twisted:

I read about the homing snails a while back. In this particular example, the snails'd had 15 years or so of freedom so they probably thought the new plants were a sort of nouveau cuisine laid on especially for them. I bet they were delighted. :lol:
Click to expand...


Bibliophilia ‏@Libroantiguo 12h12 hours ago
People attacking a "dangerous snail"
1f3a8.png
Angers - BM - SA 3390 f.089. Calendrier des bergers. Paris, 1493.

Cb8TYZnW4AAXvQa.jpg
 
Is that a middle ages attempt at visual humour? :D
 
I too wonder if it's a joke. The rabbit could be a hare, in which case it's be the one doing the hunting instead of the quarry, and the snail is about as far from a highly-trained hawk as you could imagine.
 
A German driver lost control of his car when it slipped on an unlikely road hazard — snail slime.

A slimy trail was left across the highway in Paderborn when a procession of snails crossed it, and police say the car flipped over when it hit the trail.

The driver was not injured in the incident, but his old East German Trabantcar was totalled.

The incident happened early Wednesday near Paderborn, about 350km west of Berlin.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/offb...s-after-hitting-snail-slime-on-road-1.2705349
 
Last night, after a heavy downpour, I spotted a snail scaling my kitchen window. Maybe it had climbed the abutilon that stands by the door, as otherwise it would have had to climb up several feet of rough brickwork to get there. I thought no more of it until an hour or two later when (the same?) snail was making its way up the pane in the back door. The painted panel beneath would have made access to this relatively painless but I wonder what the things think they are doing when they rise above the vegetation . . . :confused:
 
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Snails Are Going Extinct: Here's Why That Matters
They may not be the most charismatic group of species, but we can learn a lot from the lowly snail
By John R. Platt on August 10, 2016

Ah, snails. They’re small. They’re slimy. They lack the charisma of a polar bear or a gorilla. And yet just like flora and fauna all over the world, they’re disappearing.

In Hawaii, a critically endangered snail called Achatinella fuscobasis has been brought into captivity to help learn how to keep them alive in the wild. In Alabama, conservation groups have petitioned to add the oblong rocksnail (Leptoxis compacta) to the Endangered Species List. In New Zealand, a snail known only as Rhytida oconnori has found itselfconstrained to a habitat just one square kilometer in size. On Fiji, scientists have expressed an “urgent need” to keep the island’s unique tree snails from going extinct. That fate may have already happened to three snail species in Malaysia after a mining company wiped out their only habitats, a series of limestone hills.

That’s just scratching the surface. By my count, nearly 140 scientific papers about endangered snails have been published so far this year.

All of which begs the question: why does the extinction of a snail matter?

Obviously the answer to that question depends on the exact species, but we can make generalizations. Many birds, fish and other species rely on snails as important parts of their diets. Most land snail species consume fungi and leaf litter, helping with decomposition, and many are carnivores, so they help keep other species in check.

Beyond that, there’s actually a lot that we can learn from snails. “From the most practical standpoint, snails have a few pretty interesting characteristics that tell us we should probably pay attention,” says snail researcher Rebecca Rundell, assistant professor at State University of New York. For one thing, their shells—which they carry with them their entire lives (because they’d die without them)—are made of calcium carbonate, which provides a record of their lives. Unlike plant husks or insect exoskeletons, these shells tend to persist after a snail has died, leaving behind a valuable tool for researchers. “We can look in marine sediment and pockets of soil for evidence of past ecological communities, and thus evidence for environmental change in a particular area,” she says. ...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/snails-going-extinct/
 
ramonmercado said:
Snails Are Going Extinct: Here's Why That Matters
They may not be the most charismatic group of species, but we can learn a lot from the lowly snail
By John R. Platt on August 10, 2016

Ah, snails. They’re small. They’re slimy. They lack the charisma of a polar bear or a gorilla. And yet just like flora and fauna all over the world, they’re disappearing.

In Hawaii, a critically endangered snail called Achatinella fuscobasis has been brought into captivity to help learn how to keep them alive in the wild. In Alabama, conservation groups have petitioned to add the oblong rocksnail (Leptoxis compacta) to the Endangered Species List. In New Zealand, a snail known only as Rhytida oconnori has found itselfconstrained to a habitat just one square kilometer in size. On Fiji, scientists have expressed an “urgent need” to keep the island’s unique tree snails from going extinct. That fate may have already happened to three snail species in Malaysia after a mining company wiped out their only habitats, a series of limestone hills.

That’s just scratching the surface. By my count, nearly 140 scientific papers about endangered snails have been published so far this year.

All of which begs the question: why does the extinction of a snail matter?

Obviously the answer to that question depends on the exact species, but we can make generalizations. Many birds, fish and other species rely on snails as important parts of their diets. Most land snail species consume fungi and leaf litter, helping with decomposition, and many are carnivores, so they help keep other species in check.

Beyond that, there’s actually a lot that we can learn from snails. “From the most practical standpoint, snails have a few pretty interesting characteristics that tell us we should probably pay attention,” says snail researcher Rebecca Rundell, assistant professor at State University of New York. For one thing, their shells—which they carry with them their entire lives (because they’d die without them)—are made of calcium carbonate, which provides a record of their lives. Unlike plant husks or insect exoskeletons, these shells tend to persist after a snail has died, leaving behind a valuable tool for researchers. “We can look in marine sediment and pockets of soil for evidence of past ecological communities, and thus evidence for environmental change in a particular area,” she says. ...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/snails-going-extinct/
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They should all relocate to Cromer, they're thriving here, I have to play pavement hotch scotch every wet morning just to try and avoid standing on all of the little buggers ..
 
As a child I used to keep snails in an aquarium. I collected them from some local meadowland/wasteland that had been allowed to run wild. Then I moved on to gerbils and let the snails free.

You could see the descendants of the massive ones with the tortoiseshell patterned shells for years afterwards. The delicate looking little green ones didn't seem to thrive so well. Or perhaps they were just better at hiding.
 
graylien said:
As a child I used to keep snails in an aquarium. I collected them from some local meadowland/wasteland that had been allowed to run wild.
Click to expand...

Yup, they make great pets. They don't scratch the furniture or bite the postman and you don't have to walk them.
 
Salvador Dalì seems to have associated snails with vehicles, creating three variations on the theme.

The top one was the latest, created for the Dalì Museum. A Rolls Royce is covered in seaweed and snails. The passenger inside is a mermaid.

The lower image is of the first version, created in 1937. This is called Rainy Taxi or Mannequin Rotting in a Taxi-Cab.

The mannequin looks to me rather like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard - but that was thirteen years in the future!


dali4.jpg

RainyTaxi.jpg
 
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