Trails & Trials
One day come like a rose—one day like a fire;
everything has its time.
In a thousand years
the snail will have reached the tree.
—Rolf Jacobsen
The ancients believed that the moist track left by the snail as it crept was the snail's own essence, depleting its body little by little; the farther the snail toiled, the smaller it became, until it finally rubbed itself out.
—Cynthia Ozick
This that at night keeps flashing
in the calotte of my mind,
mother of-pearl trace of the snail
or emery of brayed glass,
is neither light of church or factory
—Eugenio Montale
In this falling rain
where are you off to
snail?
—Issa
My wide wake shines, now it is growing dark. I leave a lonely opalescent ribbon: I know this.
But O! I am too big. I feel it. Pity me.
If and when I reach the rock, I shall go into a certain crack there for the night. The waterfall below will vibrate through my shell and body all night long. In that steady pulsing I can rest. All night I shall be like a sleeping ear.
—Elizabeth Bishop
Like a monstrous snail a toilet slides into a living room on a track of wet, demanding to be loved.
—Russell Edson
While I was writing this letter, a moist and warm afternoon, with the thermometer at 50, brought forth troups of shell-snails, and, at the same juncture, the tortoise heaved up the mould and put out its head ... This was a curious coincidence! a very amusing occurrence! to see such similarity of feelings between the two fereokoi! for so the Greeks call both the shell-snail and the tortoise.
—Gilbert White
A slug
bathed in an ethereal glow
near a chicken.
—Kareka Tota
Island Apple Snail—This snail feeds aggressively on many types of aquatic and terrestrial plants. Apple snails were introduced to Taiwan and Hawaii for human consumption and have since spread rapidly, becoming a serious rice and taro pest. While not yet a rice pest in the continental US, there is concern that this apple snail may out-compete native snails for food. In areas where they are eaten, undercooking can lead to parasite infections (e.g. rat lung parasite).
—University of Georgia Marine Extension Service
Think that this world against the wind of time
Perpetually falls the way a hawk
Falls at the wind’s edge but is motionless--
Think that this silver snail the moon will climb
All night upon time’s curving stalk
That as she climbs bends, bends beneath her--
—Archibald MacLeish
… the continued evaporation from the moist skin of a slug or snail effects a degree of temperature regulation in all but fully saturated air … Hogben and Kirk (1944) demonstrated that the slug Arion ater maintains a body temperature lower than the surrounding air; in fact, it "behaves as a well-nigh perfect wet-bulb thermometer."
—W. Russell Hunter
… In shade the ground
darkens, and now the silver trails
stretch from leaf to chewed off leaf
of the runners of pumpkin to disappear
in the cover of sheaves of bowed grass.
On the fence blue trumpets of glory
almost closed—music to the moon,
laughter to us …
—Philip Levine
Snails can find their way over relatively huge distances, a thousand feet or more, but lose this ability if they are shaken in a bag, which raises two questions: Why do they lose this ability and why were they shaken in a bag?
—Tristan Gooley
In the evening there is a snail
passing through life across your lawn,
his trail official, a government seal.
—Laura Jensen
Slugs seemed to have the ability to pick up bits of moss, but could they carry it far enough to move the brood branches into the gaps? In order to gauge their potential as moss dispersers, we created a little raceway for them, a steeplechase course for mollusks. The course was a long glass plate, a smooth surface over which they could ooze with ease … Clearly we needed something to excite them, to entice them out to glide over the glass. What is it that motivates slugs? I am an inveterate reader of garden catalogs and remembered reading that you could lure slugs out of lettuce beds at night by leaving shallow pans of beer as traps. So, using an inducement as old as civilization, we offered a refreshing beverage at the end of the race course.
—Robin Wall Kimmerer
Snail, finding
the path
to my foot.
—Issa
Lymnaea hold memories about when to breathe through their breathing tubes (pneumostomes) in a three neuron network, which is much simpler than the colossal circuits that hold our memories. Ken Lukowiak from University of Calgary, Canada, has been working on the mechanisms of memory formation in these snails for most of his career, so he and [Barbara] Sorg decided to team up to find out whether a dose of meth could improve the snails' memories in the way it does human memories … [M]emories formed by snails under the influence of meth are harder to forget, which could help us to understand human addiction.
—Kathryn Knight
This sort of it-takes-an-invasive-to-catch-an-invasive strategy has a decidedly mixed record. In some cases it's proven highly successful; in other it's turned out to be another ecological disaster. To the latter category belongs the rosy wolfsnail--Euglandina rosea—which was introduced to Hawaii in the late nineteen-fifties. The wolfsnail, a native of Central America, was brought in to prey on a previously introduced species, the giant African snail--Achatina fulica—which had become an agricultural pest. Euglandina rosea mostly left Achatina fulica alone and focused its attention instead on Hawaii's small, colorful native snails. Of the more than seven hundred species of endemic snails that once inhabited the islands, something like ninety percent are now extinct, and those that remain are in steep decline.
—Elizabeth Kolbert
On February 20, 1990, a garden snail named Vern, owned by Sally DeRoo of Canton, MI, completed a 12 1/5 inch (31-centimeter) course at West Middle School in Plymouth, MI in a record 2 min. 13 sec. at 0.092 inches per second.
—The Guinness Book of Records
Of all the animals on Earth that live on a surface (on land or on the seabed), a substantial minority (notably the molluscs like snails and slugs) still manage without any legs at all ... Molluscs may well exploit a niche where legs are not necessary—by excreting slippery slime, they solve the friction problem in a unique way ...
—Arik Kershenbaum
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury?
—Thom Gunn
The Trobriand Islands … were just one of many points in a trading network that linked scores of communities over thousands of square kilometers of ocean, small huddled clusters of humanity that clung to coral reefs and spread over the remains of sunken mountains. Known as the Kula ring, it was a system of balanced reciprocity based on the ceremonial exchange of two items, necklaces of discs chiseled from red spondylus shells known as the soulava, and arm bands of white cone shell, the mwali. These were strictly symbolic objects with no intrinsic or utilitarian value.
—Wade Davis
The Tulotoma snail, a 2-inch-long creature native to the Coosa River in Alabama, has become the first mollusk in US history to be removed from the endangered species list. In the early '90s, the Tulotoma was extinct in 99 percent of its historic range, where dams had slowed the river's flow. Enforcement of the Clean Water Act and the Alabama Power Company's installation of aeration systems have restored the Tulotoma to 10 percent of its historic range, triggering an upgrade of its status to "threatened."
—Associated Press
Not able to bear
the stillness, a mud snail
has moved!
—Murakami Kijo