The Classic Slow Animal
Whenever someone thinks of the slowest animal they can, of course they think of the snail.
Garden snails are among the slowest land animals on earth, and banana slugs are often called
the slowest land animals.
Snails and slugs move so slowly for multiple reasons:
- Slow metabolic rate to conserve energy
- Inefficient wave-like "ventral foot" contractions to move
- Slow rate of mucus production, the secretion of which is required to reduce friction during
their movement
The Anatomy
Snails have quite unique anatomies compared to most animals. They have 4 main
features:
- The foot - used to move by contracting the muscle, but also contains the
snail's stomach
- The mantle - the organ responsible for the third feature (shells),
continuously producing
the shell for the entire lifetime of the snail
- The shell - composed mainly of salts, the spiral of the shell generally
gets bigger with age
- The radula - this is a structure used by snails to eat food (feeding
strategies differ by
species) using teeth arranged in rows
