Sand & Sea
Such power in little places:
The petal weight a coil of jelly moves,
And snails have conquered beaches.
The worm, with neither horn nor bone,
Plows acres.
—Mark Van Doren
They have brought me a snail.
Inside it sings
a map-green ocean.
My heart
swells with water,
with small fish
of brown and silver.
They have brought me a snail.
—Frederico Garcia Lorca
Snails are also represented in the plankton*, but not in the traditional format with heavy shell and a muscular foot. Planktonic mollusks are delicate little creatures with wings; hence their name: pteropods ("wing-feet"). Some have shells (Limacina), and some do not (Clione), but both types—now believed to be unrelated—"fly" through the water by the undulation of their wings, which are actually extension of the foot. The tiny coiled shells of the shelled varieties fall to the bottom when their occupants die, in such profusion that there are regions of the sea floor blanketed in what is called "pteropod ooze.
—Richard Ellis
*Plankton—Very tiny animals and plants that live in the sea
… it is a sea-snail
singing--
Relax, relent--
the sun has climbed
—William Carlos Williams
There are about 500 species of cone snails in the world's tropical oceans, and about 70 of them hunt fish. Some bury themselves in the sand, waiting for a fish to come by. When a lurking snail senses a fish, it throws out a slender tube from its mouth and wiggles it. The tube can be transparent or it can be colored a brilliant red, a soft amber or a velvety purple, depending on the species of snail. But it looks, Dr. Olivera said, for all the world like a fishing line. When a hapless fish swallows the line, a poisonous barb comes jetting out, paralyzing the fish with deadly toxins. The snail reels in the fish and swallows it whole. After about an hour and a half, it spits out the bones, the scales and the barb it used to kill the fish.
—Gina Kolata
The pond in the evening
dissolved time
twigs and insects
hands and numbers
finally move freely among each other.
Bogsnails rise slowly to the surface.
The mysteries of the deep
have come up to breathe.
—Benny Anderson
… all mammals, whales and sea-cows included, have traces of gills in the embryo: unmistakable vestiges of their remote past in the water. Freshwater snails, too, have gone back to the water from the land, and they breath air. Their earliest ancestors lived in the sea, like most of the snail family today.
—Richard Dawkins
The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a cushion of itself
—Paul Muldoon
For maximum impact in a short space of time, take a child to the seashore and challenge him to make a collection of creatures he finds on his own … In the tide pools of rocky shores dwell a seemingly endless variety of small crustaceans, snails, sea anemones, sea urchins, starfish, and other, less familiar inhabitants of the shallow marine environment.
—E.O. Wilson
Violet snails may be some of the best surfers around, but how the ocean snails developed their little rafts has been a mystery. Biologist have now figured out that the surfing snails ascended from evolutionary relatives on the ocean floor. The surfboard evolved from the snails' egg packet.
—National Public Radio
As the tide washes over its hiding place and advances up the shore, the plough snail emerges from the sand and sucks water into its foot. This expands into a large structure shaped like a ploughshare. It serves the animal not so much as a plough but as a surfboard. The waves catch beneath it and sweep the snail up the beach, depositing it at the same level as they drop much of their flotsam. The snail is extremely sensitive to the taste of decomposition in the water. As soon as it detects it, it retracts its surf-board and crawls across the wave-washed sand to the source of the taste. A stranded jelly-fish will attract dozens in a few minutes.
—David Attenborough
It is a tide pool, shallow, water coming in, clear, tiny white shell-people on the bottom, asking nothing, not even directions!
—Robert Bly
If you see snails clinging to the surface film of the water, then it is very likely that the water has warmed up a fraction and the oxygen levels have dropped to a level that is starting to threaten life in that water. The poor snails are gasping for breath and in doing so are giving you a clue to the temperature and gas levels in the water.
—Tristan Gooley
every morning on the wide shore
I pass what is perfect and shining
to look for the whelks, whose edges
have rubbed so long against the world
they have snapped and crumbled
—Mary Oliver
Sand bars, exposed at low water, or just awash, are the spots where you will find the big whelks, the owl-eyed sand snails or Naticas … One would scarcely associate the beautiful angels' wings shell with a black, odorous mud flat but that is where they live.
—A. Hyatt Verrill
Now it is notorious that land-shells are easily killed by sea-water; their eggs, at least such as I have tried, sink in it and are killed. Yet there must be some unknown, but occasionally efficient means for their transportal. Would the just-hatched young sometimes adhere to the feet of birds roosting on the ground, and thus get transported? It occurred to me that land-shells, when hybernating and having a membranous diaphragm* over the mouth of the shell, might be floated in chinks of drifted timber across moderately wide arms of the sea.
—Charles Darwin
*Diaphragm—Pron. Dia-fram. A covering or membrane made out of animal tissue.
The mockingbird squawks
from his perch, fidgets,
and settles back. The snail, awake
for good, trembles from his shell
and sets sail for China.
—Philip Levine