The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating Read Online Free PDF Page A

has been more copiously
considered than that of the elephant; and its anatomy is as
well, if not better, known: however, not to give any one object
more room in the general picture of nature than it is entitled
to, it will be sufficient to observe that the snail is surprisingly
fitted for the life it is formed to lead.
    — O LIVER G OLDSMITH ,
A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 1774

7. THOUSANDS OF TEETH
    The mouth of the snail is armed with a very formidable
instrument in the shape of a remarkable sword-like
tongue . . . [ with an ] immense number of excessively sharp
little teeth . . . The quantity of these teeth is incredible.
    — Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette, 1900
    I THOUGHT MY SNAIL’S tendency to gently nod its head as it ate was just a personality trait—but there was more to it than that. Years later I would read in more depth about the life of terrestrial snails. I requested through inter-library loan the twelve-volume compendium The Mollusca, which covers the entire phylum of mollusks—soft-bodied creatures lacking a backbone—from the octopus with its humanlike intelligence down to the tiny snail.
The scientific name for a snail or slug—a mollusk with a single muscular foot—is gastropod; derived from Latin and Greek, the word means “stomach-foot.” The poet Billy Collins ends his wonderfully quirky poem “Evasive Maneuvers” with these lines:
[I] said the word gastropod out loud,
and having no idea what it meant
went upstairs and looked it up
then hid in the woods from my wife and our dog.
If the term gastropod startled Collins, I wondered what surprises awaited me in the pages of The Mollusca. Arriving in random order, the dusty gray volumes were so heavy that I propped them up against other books and read them lying on my side. As I skimmed slowly along, reading a little bit each day, I found that every scientific field, from biology and physiology to ecology and paleontology, was packed with insights on gastropods. The abundance of detail was astonishing, ranging from their complex teeth patterns to the biochemistry of their slime making and the intimate details of their species-specific love lives. Yet even with The Mollusca ’s many volumes, a certain perspective on snail life was missing. Then I discovered the nineteenth-century naturalists, intrepid souls who thought nothing of spending countless hours in the field observing their tiny subjects. I also came across poets and writers who had each, at some point in their life, become intrigued by the life of a snail.
In the fourth century BC, in the History of Animals, Aristotle noted that snail teeth are “sharp, and small, and delicate.” My snail possessed around 2,640 teeth, so I’d add the word plentiful to Aristotle’s description. The teeth point inward so as to give the snail a firm grasp on its food; with about 33 teeth per row and maybe eighty or so rows, they form a multitoothed ribbon called a radula, which works much like a rasp. This explained my snail’s nodding head as it grated away at a mushroom; it also explained the odd squareness of the holes I had discovered in my envelopes and lists. As the front row of teeth gets worn down, a fresh new row is added at the back and the radula slowly moves forward, being completely replaced over the course of four to six weeks. Radulae are adapted to a particular snail’s diet and can be an identifying characteristic of a species.
With only thirty-two adult teeth, which had to last the rest of my life, I found myself experiencing tooth envy toward my gastropod companion. It seemed far more sensible to belong to a species that had evolved natural tooth replacement than to belong to one that had developed the dental profession. Nonetheless, dental appointments were one of my favorite adventures, as I could count on being recumbent. I could see myself settling into the dental chair, opening my mouth for my dentist, and surprising him with a human-sized radula.
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