Either in the morning while walking to school or near dam areas
I had once encountered with snails before, but it ended tragically...
I was walking to school one fine morning... and found that the path way is occupied by snails. -Sigh- So I tip-toed my way across, to avoid crushing them. As I make my move, I noticed a particular pair... I wondered what are they doing and why? So i looked closer, "intersting" was the fist word... I was too engrossed looking at one and -CRACK- i accidentially steped one snail behind me...
and suprisingly, snails are amazing creatures...
To start of,
Defination of a Snail:
Any species of gastropod mollusk with a shell that glides along on a broad tapered foot and has a high coiled shell into which it can withdraw.
Some facts of Snails;
The life span of a snail is about 5 to 10 years.
They come in differen in shapes and sizes...
Snails are found in the ocean, in fresh waters, and on land. Most snails are marine and marine snails have gills in the mantle cavity. Most land and freshwater snails have no gills; they use the mantle cavity itself as a lung. Snails may be either scavengers (of dead plant or animal matter) or predators.
Snails eat plants with their tongues. There are thousands of tiny teeth on a snail's tongue, or radula.This is a chitinous ribbon bearing teeth which is moved over a supporting protrusible “tongue” with a to-and-fro action.
The radular apparatus has a twofold function: it serves both for rasping off food material (mechanically like an inverted version of the upper incisor teeth of a beaver) and for transporting the food back into the gut like a conveyor belt.
A snail also grinds up small pieces of rock with its radula to get minerals it need for a strong healthy shell.
Interesting, don't you think?
Lets get back to the topic...
Well...
Most snails (prosobranchs) have separate genders and generally practice internal fertilisation. Some species of snails are hermaphrodites although they may act as a male or female at any one time. When two snails meet, they typically exchange sperm. Most gastropods lay eggs in a case, capsule or in gelatinous strings and masses.
When two snails meet and that the season of the loves, they begin by kisses: those are the preliminaries.
But the snails doesn't go directly from these preliminaries to copulation.
The snail, next to its head, has a muscular pouch. This muscular pouch, at a moment of the preliminaries, open and release a dart, an arrow, then, Cupid's arrow.
This arrow will go and get imbedded between the head and the shell of the partner. And this... the fact of being pricked by this dart, by this small arrow, will bring they to copulate.
Scientific investigation recently revealed that the "dart of love" is rather a means of injection. By using this dart, the snail giver injects at the recipient a mucus containing several types of hormones.
These hormones affect the genitals organs females of receptive snail.
They will emerge their penis from we don't where, but generally under the right eye.
Then, our two accomplices exchange their small bag, called spermatophore, containing the spermatozoa.
By the miracle of biology, our two male snails transform themselves into female, to produce ovules, which will be fertilized by the stored spermatozoa of the partner.
This act will last several hours (approximately 10-15).
There 15 to 20 days later, the snail will dig a hole of a few centimetres of deep. The quantity of eggs layed is approximately a hundred (that depends of the race, the age, etc...).About two weeks after mating, the snail scrapes a hole in the soil and lays its eggs there. A snail lays between 20 and 50 eggs at a time.
The eggs are covered up and they hatch after about four weeks.
VIDEO TIME!!!!
Well...
Let me start of with the project...
To me, this project is refreshing.
The topic was unexpected, but interesting indeed!
It had never crossed my mind before.
Well i guess that we are usually in a rush...
We dont see any significant in this small creature, but in a matter of fact...
If were to follow the trails of the snails, there is a lot that we could learn...
Like the song "Colours of the Wind" from the movie Pocahontas...
You think the only people who are people
Are the people who look and think like you
But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger
You'll learn things you never knew you never knew
Ya, other then watching an hour and a half of "how the snails Reproduce"...
(Which is like Super SUper SUPer SUPEr SUPER Slow)
I guess that is how Mother Nature works...
I would also wold like to cogratulate Ms Nada to be the first to use blogs as a way of approching things. In the matter fact that no other teachers, that i know, encorage students to do projects/reports by blogging.
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