Wonky-eyed snail

Photos taken:
2022/08/25

For most of the creatures I've been writing about on this blog I'm learning about them for the first time, but snails are one of the few creatures I do actually know about! I used to keep giant African land snails as a kid so I have lots of experience and love for snails. At some point I'm gonna make a shrine for my old pet GALS, they should have a little memorial site somewhere on the internet...

Anyway, I found this snail strolling around after a rain storm and I immediately noticed this little baby has a poorly eye! Her right eyestalk is all wonky and couldn't seem to stretch out to its full length :'(

Photo of common garden snail sitting on a few shrivelled up yellow flower petals and looking directly up at the camera. She has a dark grey body that is covered in small lumps and a whitish line running down her middle. The shell is a mixture of pale yellows and dark browns, curling in a striped pattern around the coil of her shell. The lip of her shell is rounded and light yellow in colour. One of her eyestalks is bent at an angle.

She'll be okay tho! Snails have very poor eyesight to begin with, only really being about to differentiate light and dark, and the eyeball itself doesn't appear to be damaged so it probably isn't affecting her much. Other than her eyestalk being wonky and the older parts of her shell being a bit scratched up she seemed to be pretty healthy and is probably quite old! It's hard for me to say exactly how old, but judging by the curved outer lip of her shell she's probably fully grown and has survived at least a few winters. Good for her!

She's doing a lot better than most of the snails I find in the garden who unfortunately are very malnourished. For some reason snails keep laying clutches of eggs underneath the shed which means large numbers of baby snails crawl up the shed walls where there is no vegetation to eat and zero access to calcium, and as a result a lot of them have very transparent shells and don't seem to live long after hatching. Next time I see a clutch of hatchlings I might just adopt some for a few weeks to give them a better chance of survival. It'd be nice to look after some snails again.

If you would like to help out the snails where you live, there are some very easy little things you can do:

Firstly eggshells! These are a good source of calcium for snails to help build their shells and all you need to do is break them up into small pieces and maybe rinse out any raw egg first.

Here's some I left out. It's probably better to break the shells up smaller than this and also scatter them rather than leaving them in a pot, but you can tell the snails have been enjoying the eggshells because they've left shit everywhere. That's what the curly black things are. Snails are very talented at pooing.

Photo of a small pot full of broken up eggshells. Dark curled snail poo is littered all over the pot and outside of it too.

The second thing you can do to feed garden snails is one I haven't actually tried yet but should work fine; chickpeas! They're full of useful protein and can be made into a hummus-like paste by mashing a few with a fork and maybe adding a few drops of water.

(Please don't give them actual store bought hummus tho! The citrus juices normally added to hummus can be poisonous to snails.)

And if you want to give your garden snails a larger treat, they will very happily munch on a wide variety of fruits and vegetables! I'd recommend checking out dedicated snail care websites for more information on what foods are good for them, but my old snails really loved bananas and tomatoes; went absolutely wild for them.

That's all the snail talk for now. As a little bonus, please enjoy this footage I took of our wonky-eyed friend strolling around. The good thing about snails is that they are very easy to film.

Photo of the same snail now sliding down some wood. This image give a good view of the very ends of the shell's coil, which has lost its colour and turned white. Also clear here is the length difference between her two eyestalks: the healthy one is stretched out twice as long as her damaged one.

After this she continued to climb down from the wood onto an area of the garden which has lots of stones and pebbles and repeatedly tried to bury into them to extremely little success. Snails are very silly animals.