The Slow Adventure
“Huh—when I cleaned out the snail house, I had six snails. Now I only see five. I wonder where the other one is hiding.”
Dane sighs. He gets exhausted when I go on about my pet gastropods, whom I faithfully mist morning and night and continually watch. Garden snails, classified as mollusks, are nocturnal, and that’s perfect for me. I often get up during the night, which is a great time to spy on them.
Putting my ear into the aquarium when they're perched on a celery stalk is delightful. Chop, chop, chomp, go their tiny, razor-sharp teeth. And I adore watching them in their bathtub, which also doubles as their drinking dish. They stretch themselves out as if they’re sunbathing, and dip their heads in the water like they’re trying to cool off.
I started my aquarium of garden snails with Flo and Griff, and now I have “Flos and Griffs.” It was too challenging to keep adding names. When I talk to them, they all stop what they’re doing—sliding, sticking to the glass, getting some calcium, taking a bath, or eating—and strain their adorable bodies toward my voice. Their eyes (atop their eyestalks) can see me, but since they don’t have ears, they feel the vibrations of my voice inside their glass home.
“Hey, Dane, there’s one big one that has a crease in her shell. Could she have eaten one of the other snails? A neighbor told me she thinks they absorb the babies. And we used to have tons of babies.”
“Absorb babies?! What does that mean?”
“I’m guessing it means eating each other.”
Dane sighs again and leaves me to my ruminations. I start to question my memory. Could I have miscounted and had only five? When I slice a cucumber and set it in their feeding bowl, I start to poke around. Maybe one of the snails is under the dirt, laying eggs.
Technically, since they are hermaphrodites, both Flos and Griffs can have babies, producing up to six batches of eggs in a year. We’ve seen at least three big batches in the past two years. Each time, I’ve come downstairs, stopped to say, “Good morning, snails,” and then exclaimed loudly, “Babies!”
After mating, each snail can lay around 80 eggs in a hole in the soil. They’ll hatch two weeks later. Seeing as I started with two snails and now have six—okay, five—large snails and no babies, maybe some absorbing is going on.
After doing a bit of research, we discover that snails don’t eat other snails (I sigh in relief), but they may scrape the shells of others to get calcium. Exploring a little further, I learn that egg cannibalism can happen: the first snails hatched in a clutch may eat other eggs. It’s been awhile since I cleaned their aquarium, and I’m still counting snails when Dane comes sleepy-eyed down the stairs. He stops when he sees what I’m doing.
“Come here and count, please,” I ask him. “How many snails do you see?” With a sigh, he looks at the aquarium for a split second, says, “Five,” and shuffles off to get his cup of tea.
A few days later, I'm hustling, preparing for my friend Bonnie to help me paint some walls. Every knickknack needs to be moved out of the living room. I start to fill other surfaces—the kitchen island, the top of Dane’s desk, and the counters—and soon run out of empty spaces. I decide to move the dish rack to make more room when I yelp, “Flo...Griff…snail!”
No one is here to share my excitement as I scoop up the snail from its hiding place, quickly mist it, grab a handful of lettuce from the fridge, and set the snail on the lettuce. There were six snails after all!
Dane is at his house, visiting his cats, not wanting to get in the way of the cleaning and painting, so I call him. “Six!” I exclaim. “The sixth snail was living under the dish rack!”
Dane doesn’t respond, so I repeat myself and tell him the snail must have gotten out when I cleaned their house. Because they're nocturnal, we didn’t see it. I figured it was climbing into the sink at night and eating whatever veggies had gotten stuck in the strainer, then climbing back out and sleeping peacefully under my clean dishes. The dishes go into the rack wet, so he/she was even getting misted.
It’s a good, good day here. All day long I’m silently chanting, Six, I have six healthy snails! As for Flo or Griff or whoever it was that was living off sink leftovers, they're fine. Better than fine—they had an adventure! Within a minute of setting them on the lettuce, I could hear them healthily rasping away: chop, chop, chomp.
