The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating Read Online Free PDF

snail species are predatory, and a few are even cannibalistic and will bore a hole through another snail’s shell or attack directly through an aperture. These snails have evolved fewer but longer teeth, which, rather sinisterly, they can fold out of the way to give more mouth room for ingesting their victims.
This particular trait gave me the shudders. Even though my snail was not cannibalistic, I would not want to meet up with it or any other snail that was humansized, which brought to mind Patricia Highsmith’s short story “The Quest for Blank Claveringi. ” Avery Clavering, a zoology professor, hears about the mythical man-eating snails of Kuwa, and hoping to prove their existence and gain fame by naming the species after himself, he sets off in pursuit. Arriving in Kuwa, he finds the giant twenty-foot snails grazing on treetops. Then they notice him. He assumes that it will be easy to “escape from two slow, lumbering creatures like the—the what? . . . Carnivora (perhaps) Claveringi. ” But the professor gets a little too close to his live specimens, and so begins the most peculiar, and certainly the slowest, chase scene ever to occur in literature. With the giant snails in leisurely but relentless pursuit, Clavering becomes exhausted and seeks shelter between some boulders. One of the snails seals its slimy foot over his refuge, nearly smothering him. Eventually he escapes into the sea, but the giant snails follow and the plot reaches its grizzly end.

8. TELESCOPIC TENTACLES
    The [snail’s] tentacles are as expressive as a mule’s ears,
giving an appearance of listless enjoyment when they hang
down, and an immense alertness if they are rigid, as happens
when the snail is on a march.
    — E RNEST I NGERSOLL , “In a Snailery,” 1881
    W HEN MY SNAIL was active, its muscular head and foot were extended outside its shell, but at the slightest hint of a disturbance, it quickly withdrew them into the shell’s largest, outermost whorl. Its soft body, containing the vital organs—a lung, a heart, and a gastrointestinal system—was connected to its shell by an internal mantle, which also provided space for a water reservoir. It could store about one-twelfth its weight in water and thus, camel-like, survive stretches of dry weather.
About half of my snail’s respiration occurred through its skin, and the other half through a breathing pore—a little hole on its right side below its head. Called a pneumostome, this pore allows air exchange by diffusion, opening infrequently, maybe four times a minute, more or less, depending on the snail’s activity. As warm-blooded creatures, or homeotherms, we humans have to maintain a constant body temperature, but my cold-blooded poikilotherm snail’s temperature matched that of its changing environment. Thus it could get by on half the calories needed by a similarly sized mammal.
My snail was equipped with two pairs of tentacles: the lower pair were a quarter of an inch in length, while the upper pair were nearly half an inch long, with eyes at the tips. The snail could instantly retract its eyes through these hollow tentacles, which themselves retracted just as quickly into its head. “The first striking peculiarity [of the snail] is that the animal has got its eyes on the points of its largest horns,” exclaimed Oliver Goldsmith in 1774 in A History of the Earth and Animated Nature. And at the end of the nineteenth century, in The Dawn of Reason, James Weir explained more precisely that “the snail carries its eyes in telescopic watchtowers.”
When my snail was foraging for food or grazing on a mushroom, its tentacles quivered and twitched continuously. They stretched toward desirable smells but were instantly retracted from anything the least bit offensive. The snail could move its tentacles individually in nearly any direction up to a ninety-degree angle, sweeping them slowly back and forth and up and around, just as a boat under way in the dark swings its