![]() ![]() This clever method was inspired by the Snail's Tales blog. The radula scrapes up, or rasps, food particles and the jaw cuts off larger pieces of food, like a leaf, to be rasped by the radula. To understand what the single jaw and radular band look like in a terrestrial snail, two Museum interns (from Glendale Community College), Ala Babakhanians and Richard Laguna, photographed a common European Garden Snail (Cornu aspersum) eating a film of cornstarch and water on a piece of glass. Snails and slugs eat with a jaw and a flexible band of thousands of microscopic teeth, called a radula. There are specialist and generalist species that eat worms, vegetation, rotting vegetation, animal waste, fungus, and other snails. Snails and slugs have evolved to eat just about everything they are herbivorous, carnivorous, omnivorous, and detritivorous (eating decaying waste from plants and other animals). Well, I’d like to guess that it is more fascinating than you’d expect, if you’ve ever thought about snail and slug feeding in the first place. The anatomy involved in land snail and slug feeding is fascinating. ![]() Have you ever wondered what the inside of a snail's mouth looks like? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |