Last week, on a sunny morning, I took this picture of a little snail as it crossed the sidewalk in front of my house. I later realized that I could sort of see through him. This was a much different and much more pleasant sight than what I usually see of snail innards, which is squished snail guts on the sidewalk! So what are all those parts there that I can see? I decided to find out!
Google provided me with many diagrams of snail anatomy. I liked this one because it was colorful and easy to read, and the snail in the diagram was positioned just like my snail photo. (and if you click the photo, it will take you to the Snail World website, where I found it.)
Unfortunately, the real thing still looks different from the diagram to my untrained eye, so I wasn't sure what I was seeing in my photo. I labeled the few things I thought I could recognize. The only organ I had actually seen before (without realizing what it was at the time) was the lung, Hoping Aydin from Snail's Tales will see this and help me fill in the blanks.
That is fascinating. It's wonderful to find out that there is much more to small life than gelatinous goo (which is what I grew up thinking most stuff was made out of :-P )
ReplyDeleteJust the other day I submitted an article on studying snail anatomy from photographs. I will try to remember to send you a copy after it publishes later this year. As for your photo, the lung is correct. What you labeled esophagus with a question mark is probably the retractor muscle of the lower tentacle. Above it you can see the retractor muscle of the upper tentacle. The brown line just below the upper tentacles is probably the radula, which is, surprisingly, not labeled in the diagram. C may indeed be the cerebral ganglia (brain). I don't know what B & D are. A could just be a colored patch within the skin. There is a wide "line" darker than the lung spiraling around the whorl starting at the darker mass in the back & continuing to the aperture of the shell; that's the lower intestine. At the end of it is the anus next to the pneumostome (not visible), the respiratory pore. The location of the latter in the diagram is wrong.
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