The sound of a wild snail eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Author:Elisabeth Tova Bailey [Elisabeth Tova Bailey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sciences
ISBN: 9781565126060
Published: 2010-08-24T18:10:52+00:00

13. A SNAIL’S THOUGHTS

why

such careful consideration

snail?

— KOBAYASHI ISSA (1763 – 1828)

I WAS CERTAIN THAT my snail was just as aware of the details of its world as I was of mine, and so I began to wonder about its intelligence. As I crept through the pages of scientific gastropod literature, I found myself stuck to the page that describes a snail’s brain, which, depending on its species, has 5,000 to 100,000 giant neurons.

A snail has memory; it can learn new smells and tastes and retain the knowledge for weeks or months, adapting its behavior accordingly. “Too many people think . . . that snails have no brains at all,” writes the malacologist Ron Chase in their defense. Like humans, older snails tend to learn more slowly than younger ones. There are plenty of situations that scare a snail, and even scientists now use the term fear to describe a snail’s reactions to danger.

In 1880, an unknown author declared in an essay titled “Snails and Their Houses” that the snail “is by no means lacking in intelligence, but exemplifies the truth of the aphorism that still waters run deep.” Lorenz Oken, a German naturalist of the same century, waxed rhapsodic in his Elements of Physiophilosophy:

Circumspection and foresight appear to be the thoughts of the [snail] . . . What majesty is in a creeping Snail, what reflection, what earnestness, what timidity and yet at the same time what firm confidence! Surely a Snail is an exalted symbol of mind slumbering deeply within itself.

Even contemporary malacologists seem to be aware of the complexity of an individual gastropod’s life. “Clearly, to achieve any real understanding of the life of a slug or snail, the whole life history must be taken into account,” explains A. J. Cain in his chapter in The Mollusca, “Ecology and Ecogenetics of Terrestrial Molluscan Populations.” The biologists Teresa Audesirk and Gerald Audesirk note just as respectfully in their own chapter, “Behavior in Gastropod Molluscs,” that “as investigators themselves learn to ‘think like a snail’ . . . ever more amazing feats of [snail] learning power are revealed.”

An account of a snail’s behavior in a tight situation intrigued me. It appeared in “Mental Powers and Instincts of Animals,” a chapter in Charles Darwin’s manuscript Natural Selection:

Mr. W. White . . . fixed a land [snail] in a chink of rock . . . in a short time the animal protruded itself to its utmost length, & attaching its foot vertically above tried to pull the shell into a straight line; then resting for a few minutes, it stretched out its body on the right side & pulled its utmost but failed; resting again, it protruded its foot on the left side pulled with its full force & freed the shell. This exertion of force in three directions, which seems so geometrically reasoned, might have been instinctive.

Were I stuck in a chink of rock, I’d have tried a similar approach. This raises the unanswerable question of where instinct ends and intellect begins.

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