Malacology (SNAILS & SLUGS) with Jann Vendetti

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Oh hey, it's your aunt's innocent work crush. Ali Ward back for another episode of Ologies. Okay, it's time for us to come out of our spiral shells and give snails a whirl. Now this episode is a big derby bag of happy surprises. I have learned so much from snails and their origin stories, their adaptability, their non binary outlook on life. It's inspiring. I think I love them

But thank you to all of you who always leave nice reviews.

Like Nick silver Fangirl said that Ologies is like if PBS allowed swearing, and I'm like, nice, don't worry, I swear a lot more later. So onto Malacology, the study of molluscs. Malacology comes from the Greek word ready for this for soft animal, and it deals with mollusks, ranging from snails and slugs and bivalves octopuses.

There are so many mollusks. Malacology really is an umbrella term that covers so many. But there are subsets, like the amazing tothology. There's an episode on that about squid. It's great, she's great. Now there isn't a specific snail ology. Lime Ecology is a study of slugs. Slugs get thrownology, but snails don't get their own. This episode, which is just a carnival of slug and snail facts, we're gonna go with the curator's title of malacologist.

Now.

This ologist is just wonderfully charming. She's informative and passionate. And Frank I was so excited to head to the Museum of Natural History in LA to hang out in her office, setting my iced latte down on a coffee table that turned out to be a slab of fossils and shells in rock millions of years old. And when she told me, I was like eh, And I asked if I should use a coaster, and she said very dryly. Nah, it survived a long time through a lot worse. I mean,

It's one of my favorite places.

So I got up early and wore something comfortable but cute, and I made extra sure to be there on time.

But there was one issue. Today the forecast is one hundred and eleven degrees. I'm walking three blocks from the parking garage to the museum.

And I had to rest under a tree halfway there.

I'm gonna die. What if this is how I die?

I die walking free blocks in LA to go interview a snail expert.

If that's how I go, That's how I go. So spoiler, I lived.

But we got to her office and I had to decide whether to weather the weather or just keep the AC going. So we turned it off for sonic reasons, and we made it through. But what resulted was a truly wonderful discourse about the most shocking and erotic mating

I feel like we might actually die because I don't want to have to call the corner in the middle of this interview for either one of us. I don't want my ghost to call the corner. It's so is the hottest it.

And there is no camera, so it doesn't matter where I'm sitting in, what I look like, and what I'm doing.

Yeah you could.

You could not even be wearing shoes or pants right now and no one would care. I oftentime record my narration just for all Episode's the best thing about podcast.

Okay, So Jan has worked as the malacology and Invertebrate Paleontology collections curator at the Natural History Museum of La County for three years. And I like to picture her behind the scenes as the malacology queen, wearing like a stiff brown circular cape and a crown with bejeweled eyestalks, but she was just down to earth and Khaki's in a gray shirt. Like imagine if Anna Kendrick were playing a really cool ass museum scientist.

Now.

Before she landed in La Jan got a bachelor's in biology and geology and a PhD in integrative biology at Berkeley before making a glistening path into the garden of professional malacology.

Sure, so I did my bachelor's degree at Colgate University in upstate New York, and that I double majored in biology and geology. So that gave me a lot of crossover with paleobiology, which is what I was very.

Much interested in.

So ecosystems, mostly marine ecosystems from the past and today, normally paletologies with rocks, right, so the organization goes dead things in rocks go with rocks, not with the thing that are dead in them, so they don't go into a biology department, even though you're studying the biology of these things that are dead often. So I was interested in paleontology from a more biology perspective, a more paleobiology perspective.

Cool.

So anyway, so I went there, got my PhD there in integrated biology, and then came down to Los Angeles to do a post doc in c slug phylogenetics, so sea slugs and their relationships to each.

Other, I mean, as one does. And then of course came the job at the museum here in blistering, hot, scorching LA.

So I stayed in LA.

And so now I'm in LA and if all goes well, I will stay here, which is a surprise because I never thought I'd be in Los Angeles.

When you think about LA, it seems so arid. It's amazing. We even have snails right.

Originally studied marine gastropods, but then the museum, this museum had a real push for community science or citizen science in mostly terrestrial biology, so animals that are living on land. So that shifted my research focus to terrestrial gastropods, which are mostly which are slugs and snails, and mostly the species living in urban environments, which almost nobody's done any work on.

Right.

I saw that on I saw that on the website. I was like, you deal in urban malacology, which is like so bad ass, Like I love that there's like city snails on like fixed gear bikes and buy dollar coffees.

Story right, right, You're never going to buy their houses because they spend all their money on avocado TOAs.

There.

Yeah, so the almost nobody study them. And there's this interesting phenomenon called synanthropy or sin anthrapy, synanthropy. Synanthropy, something can be synanthropic, which means that it lives with it lives near or in or because of human habitation. So human disturbance of an environment makes uh is good for these species.

Right, So yes, some species actually benefit when big stupid naked apes have gone in and torn up the land to make houses and lawns and golf courses because there are resources that wouldn't otherwise be there. If you know then they will.

So it's like this is sort of the tail of invasive or introduced species, which aren't necessarily the same thing.

Of course, not because we don't The lawns aren't natural here, right, we're right scrub brush, Like, what are the snails going to do here?

But they're like, ooh, look at this, that's news, so they do really. Yeah, so there's a bunch of snails too.

That So we've been documenting introduced taxa, which like I said,

For more on genetic drift, which is kind of like rolling a twenty sided die in terms of DNA, listen to the Evolutionary Biology episode and then go out and say to a snail, Hey, dude, you made it. Who it's crazy.

It's all sorts of fun things that we can ask once we sort of know who the players are and where they are. And so that's still where we are now, trying to figure out which species live here and where.

And my first question is why snails?

Why at all?

Why gas? Why anybody?

What?

No like in you like? At what point were you like?

These are the this is the group for me, yes, like yeah, because they're so cool. But you like, yeah, I'm going to be a malacologist.

It's happening right.

Well, for any young person who's looking to become a malacologist, they should know that there are no malacology programs in the US or really anywhere as far as I know.

So yeah, so.

It's not a it's not a path that has been tread by future or ancestral generations of scientists.

So you got to make your own slime trail future malacologists because instead of there being programs about molluscs specifically, you kind of come at it from the side, like a side door, like hello, and.

Did you get here?

How did I become that? Because there was no program to study it specifically. I took courses in invertebrates, right, so paleontological focused courses. It sort of just so happened that I ended up working with somebody who did sea slugs because they were totally awesome.

So I wanted to do sea slugs and that was also a malis.

I thought maybe gastropods would have like a crappy fossil record because they're squishy as hell, But duh, I mean I forgot a lot of them have shells, which big news here. Not squishy. That's a whole godamn point of a shell. They're squishless. Also, now, the way that some shells are perfectly coiled is because of math and because lopsided protein production when building their shells causes them to

So they can tell you a lot about trends in evolution and rates of change and things like that because there are lots of them, where it's harder to do that with say, dinosaurs, because they're although they're much more charismatic in people's minds, right, and much more compelling in as skeletons there, they can be somewhat data poor in giving you lots of there'sn't that many of them, so the data points are fewer, whereas snails you have, and

Right, Everyone that lives and dies is like boop, here's michelle, yep, have a look at it later.

I'm gonna go die but find now did you love snails and slugs.

As a kid? I liked intertitle.

I like tidepools as a kid, so I spent a lot of time in tidepools invertebrates. So I could just sit in a tide pool and that was what I was interested in, and I just stayed interested in that.

So you did not grow up in like Nebraska.

No, I grew up in New Jersey. But no, not really. They have the shore shot.

But okay, sorry, let's get to snails now. So let's get to the most obvious question. And one million patrons asked us questions. I'm just going to condense it to my one of my first what is the difference between a snail and a slug? What is the difference a snail and a slug? Clearly went as a shell. They're both gastropods, that's right, which means that they have a foot on their stomach. Right in Latin, they're belly footers kind of right.

Yeah, yes, I mean that's that's what the term means. What's the difference between snails and slugs?

Yeah?

I know that seems like an obvious question, a good question, So I get asked that question a lot, and people often think or I've encountered people who thought that slugs are just snails that have kind of cast off their shell, like I'm done with this shell and now I'll be a slug, so.

Like it's a goth face. That's not how it works.

So I'm so sorry for the screaming. That just totally that threw me because it's so cute. But I love the idea that slugs maybe go through like a breakup and then just dish their shells like people cut bangs they have.

So I've explained that that snails and slugs are both, like you said, gastropods, but there's lineages multiple places, multiple times. A slug is just the name for a snail whose shell is either absent or so small that the snail cannot retract into it fully. So there are things called semi slugs that have like little almost like the stigial shells, like this little dinky shell on it that it can't do anything with.

I like to picture this type of shell as a tiny, non functional hat, like one worn at a steampunk Edwardian ball, or like a Jean Paul Gotier runway show or a royal wedding, and it turns out that tiny nonfunctional hats have a name. They're literally called fascinators, which, by the bye, comes from the Latin word for to cast a spell on, which comes from an earlier word for a dick shaped amulet worn to do witchcraft. So semi slugs just slugging

It's just still there.

Others have an internal shell which is like a little disc that sometimes you can even see when you're looking down at a sort of semi translucent slug, which we have in Los Angeles from Europe, you can see like a little disc sort of in the middle of its body, and that's its tiny little remnant shell. So snails and slugs are both gastropods. Snails obviously what we usually call

Never lost it during their life. They were born that way.

And so are slugs more evolved in some ways than snails because they over generations and generations are like I don't even need the shell, right.

No, I'd say that not more evolved, just differently evolved. I mean, it's hard to say more or less, right because everything is always evolving, like every lineage is always evolving. Some gas dropods have extremely elaborate denticals or you could call them teeth that are at the margin of their aperture, so the opening of the shell, which makes their bodies able to get out but very difficult for other things to get in.

So next time you see those insane tire knife strips near like the exit of a rental car place, just think a snail is that hardcore?

They will shred you.

And some one might argue that that is a highly evolved trait that is an anti predator trait or series of And slugs will evolve toxins on their body that make them unpalatable, right because if you imagine a slug has nothing.

To it's just slugging along.

And it's just clearly something that something could just eat. Right, But like a banana slug for example, since we're in California, like banana slugs have all kinds of compounds on their bodies and that has all sorts of chemicals in it that make them highly unpalatable to predators.

Oh, slugs turning birds everywhere into feathery Gordon Ramses.

Jesus sauce is hideous.

That is fucking disgusting.

That's why they can do slime around without anything eating them. They can slim around. I love that that's a verb.

And I imagine also that might have that yellow color might be a warning sign you.

Might, yeah, I mean some of them are brown, so it seems like some of them are using color for camouflage. But some of them are bright, which yeah, might be like in colorations and don't eat me.

I'm disgusting.

But there are people who who have their whole research program is banana slugs because they're really weird and fascinating.

So side note, I got thirsty for some weird banana slug facts, like maybe they like the sound of whistling, or they're all sagittariuses. But what did I find? That Their scientific name means big penis, and their members can be the length of their entire body, sprouting from their heads, and they can jump off another's penis. Like okay, you cool, You done with that? So boy, howdy this really whoa This convo was about to take a turn.

I can tell you the weirdest thing about slugs in general.

They have highly, highly elaborate reproductive morphology. That was one of my first questions, which which is I mean to be like very specific about that they have giant, elaborate penises.

I mean, that's what they've got. One of my first questions. My first question is why why why snails? My second question is love making all smells and slugs terrestrial. Almost all the very vast majority I have both reproductive male and female reproductive parts, so we call that hermaphroditic.

And they.

When they mate, they simul usually will simultaneously impregnate each other, which means that they're giant penises or however, not always giant, but they can have very elaborate reproductive systems, specifically penises to.

Sort of get the job done.

And then they both leave that mating encounter and go off and lay eggs fertilized eggs. So it's a very efficient system. Right, you don't have one sex that cannot lay eggs. Both sexes can do both things. It's very efficient and for a lot of reasons they've evolved these like very elaborate reproductive. I mean it's even called courtship. Like they'll different species will follow each other. They're around in very stereotypical ways and like touch each other and then.

Like slime around each other.

Yeah, and this is something that is somewhat new to me because I did. It's not what I originally studied, but I've become I have studied it since working here.

It's fascinating and strange and wonderful.

And if you wanted to find the best video ever, if there can be such a thing. David Attenborough narrating leopard slug. Leopard slug sex Climax maximus ONEX maximus is this species.

It's called a leopard slug, more like Climax maximus.

Oh yeah, I was looking all this up in a Chicago coffee shop this week and I had to like ankle my laptop screen because technically I was watching slug porn in public. And I won't lie. It was very sensual.

Here's how it works.

So one slug is DTF and leaves a saucy little tray of pheromones, and another slug smells it and is like, hey, what.

Up you be the pursuer to confirm that it's there and ready to mate. Gives the pursued a nibble.

The pair climbs a tree and then they wrap themselves around each other and they descend on a cord of thick slime. They kind of drop down and hang like a Moroccan lantern at a Bohemian styled Airbnb.

Yes, they'll sort of intertwine themselves and make sticky and then slide down a string from a tree and wind themselves around each other and then extend their giant penises that intertwine with each other and are blue and translucent, and it is wild.

They fan out to form a translucent flower like globe. And now I've lost sperm prosses from one slug to the other.

And David Attenborough does a very David Attenborough job of describing this incredible phenomenon with.

Like warm objectivity.

Yes, yes, sounds like if you went to an electric daisy carnival and you had a really wickedly slash.

Blue penises and yep, yeah, they're uh yeah, they do all sorts of weird stuff.

Why do they have such monster donks?

Well, there is there's probably a better answer than I can give. But the answer that I can give, which sort of partially answers that question, is that species differences are what your your reproductive parts look like.

Which are on the inside most of the time.

So when there's reproductive isolation, so when one group becomes isolated, and then over time they accumulate differences that then make them different enough so that if they were to ever encounter that other species, they wouldn't be able to mate. They'refore whatever reason, their reproductive morphology evolves quickly, relatively quickly, more quickly than their.

Body structure on the surface.

If you look at what looks like one species, right, it's a black slug with an orange foot, all right, that it can look that way, and there can be a whole bunch of species that look the same way, but inside the reproductive morphology or their penis morphology is very different. So that means that they are now reproductively isolated from each other. That keeps them reproductively isolated or

So slugs tiny shell or no shell, but big dick energy for days, probably because they don't have the expense of making a shell.

I really don't know. And now let's talk a little bit about anyone can get pregnant, that it's just knocked up, free for all.

Why don't we have that in other species? Please? Huh? Yeah?

One to answer the the first part, why are more organisms not hermaphroditic or have both male and female reproductive parts.

Part of it is that.

There is an advantage, but a bigger disadvantage to self fertilize. So sometimes if you have both parts, you can fertilize yourself.

Oh my god, that's so narcissistic, right, So.

Then you can make you can make offspring that you are.

You are both a mother and the father.

They're not clones, but they are your offspring with no partner, right, So that can be problematic because you don't get variations. The scientific consensus generally is that if you are self fertilizing, that's not a great system in the long run for genetic diversity, and when environments change, you always need genetic diversity,

Survive and then have offspring. Right, So that's usually a good thing.

So diversity helps make populations stronger. If certain political powers were as intelligent as slugs, they could comprehend this.

And why not more hermaphroditic.

It's just possible that it didn't evolve in some groups, and the groups that it did evolve in, sometimes it continues. It seems like sometimes hermaphroditic reproductive systems continue to be how that system evolves or that species evolves. But anytime you have any mutation that changes that knocks out either them female or male reproductive system.

Then you have one.

And then that could be after that you're on the road to separate sexes. Could be that having separate sexes is good. It's possible that you get more variation when you have males, possibly, and that's usually one of the the sort of the go to explanations that males are like. I give a lecture in an evolutionary biology course that is called why males.

And that's for the purposes of the course.

The reason we have that lecture is because why would you ever have a sex that does not have eggs?

Do you know what I mean?

From an evolutionary perspective, why would you ever have a sex that can't lay eggs?

No, that's buddy, that it's like males. What's the point, right, So.

We need someone to explain, right, Yeah, so from an evolutionary perspective, they're the reason that the answer is that males provide genetic differentiation. They provide variation to the population, whereas females do too. But having males just be males, there's also of than dynamics that can happen if you have males that don't males as males, which by definition cannot procreate with eggs.

I mean, I guess males are just like a genetic storehouse. Yeah, like a gammyt confetti gun. Yeah, you know, just get it out there.

Yeah, that's I mean, that's one way to think of it. Yeah. And meanwhile, here we are toiling internally like I made.

One baby, Yes, I mean that, yeah, and that's a whole Yeah, that's a very interesting.

Yeah, that's very interesting. They're like males and the number.

Of offspring a male can have versus a female, which is totally different if you're hermaphroditic, right, which is totally different yep, because it's much more egalitarian sort of by definition, if you're hermaphroditic and you're a slug. Because there is no light, there are no separate sexes. Everybody's everybody's reproductively the same.

It sounds like socialism is the best form.

Now, let's bone up on detail about the gas lighty romance of snail love making.

One is in land snails, and they have these structures. Not all land snails have them, but the ones that do have structures called love darts. Have you heard about this?

No?

Okay, So our common European garden snail, which is I call it the wet sidewalk snail. Like if it rains, when it rains in Los Angeles on a sidewalk, you'll see a snail and it's probably ninety nine percent of the time. If you live in urban suburban parts of Los Angeles or southern California, it'll be this snail. It's a European snail. It just like a brown brownish light brown, dark brown, modeled sort of shell. It just looks very like boring. It just looks like a snail.

And it's a helix. What is it?

It's right, it used to be helix aspersa. Now it's corner with spursa. They changed the genus.

Name a while ago. Really, yeah, but that's not uncommon. Okay, Yes, that's the snail.

So that snail and others when as they're mating, they can deploy a dart and it's it's a calcareous or kiteness, like if you imagine a corneous person of common European garden snails about the size of like a half dollar, like a like one and a half times the size of a quarter in size.

It's shooting a dart.

The dart is probably like the length of your middle finger nail. Okay, So it's it's not inc it's not microscopic. It's a macroscopic. And they'll shoot that at each other, sometimes to the detriment of the other snail and sometimes killing the other snail, which it's not that's not the intent of it. But what it does is it it

So, for obvious reasons, many scholars believe that the lore of matchmaking Cupid was based on these very love darts of our horny snail friends. So the individual that gets the dart is more likely to digest in its body

So the dart is like a dib's.

Like it's almost like an aphrodisiac where they're like, I don't care about all the others, that's right, sperm, I god, this is the one I'm into.

That's right. It's like a DIBs. It's like soulmates, like a soulmate arrow. Yeah, so it's called a love dart.

I mean it's kind of an named Yeah themerroology.

Is there oxytocin a play or does that even happen? I don't know. It's a hormone.

I don't know what hormones though, and someone does someone knows about snail hormones.

I do not.

So apparently the slick goo covering this little love spear has an allo hormone, which is a substance that causes the female reproductive organs to not digest the dart tosser's sperm and to also keep the reproductive track open. So it's essentially like a stabby message meant to convey, Hey, I'm gonna be your baby's dad in a minute. Let's put a pin in this.

In terrestrial snails, slugs don't seem to do that as far as I know. Snails a bunch of snails and the helicids, the helicid.

Snails will do it.

And in sea slugs there are a bunch of different species I know of in the Saccaglossa, which are there the sap sucking slugs.

There's sea slugs that some of them.

Can incorporate chloroplasts from the algae that they eat and put it in their body where it continues to photosynthesize. That makes them one of the well, if not the only photosynthetic animal.

Right.

It's not indogenous, right, it's not that they are. They've evolved photosynthesis, but they can use something that's photosynthetic. They're taking a chloroplast, right, the photosynthetic machinery of an alga, and taking just that organelle and putting it in their body, which is really wild.

That's resourceful as well. Yeah, right, so they can.

Some of those species and other ones related to them that don't necessarily have the ability to what's called kleptoplasty, they can't grab chloroplasts and.

Keep them kleptoplasty. I will never not relate these sea slugs to shoplifters tucking chloropast organelles into their pants.

But in that group sack of glossa they can. They have a penis with a little barb on it, like a little it's called a stylet, like a little sword ending and they can go around and they're a homaphroditic, right, So anyone who's acting as a male at that moment, which is anything anytime you use your penis, you can.

Poke or stab.

You can stab a potential partner and inseminate them that way. So it's called hypodermic insemination. Oh my god, which is exactly what it sounds like. But every individual is able to do that hypodermic hypodermic because it's like a like hypodermic insemination.

That's like a whole new play on needle dick inside.

Because you're like, no for real though, oh my god, so are you ever at cocktail parties and someone's like, hey, jan this conversations more, get over here.

I have two little kids, so I'm rarely at cocktail parties. But my postdoc advisor has been at cocktail parties and started telling the hypodermic insemination story, which, as you might imagine, really gets a lot of interest.

Okay, moving on from slug dicks. So many people have this question. Can you give me, in a nutshell the difference between terrestrial and aquatic snails and slugs?

What's the deal? Why can some of them hang out?

Sure? Yeah, right, So terrestrial means lives on land, and obviously aquatic means lives in freshwater or if it's the ocean, we would normally call it marine. And then from the marine realm, different lineages have evolved, most of them like it was a big introduction once or a big evolutionary innovation that one lineage evolved to be terrestrial, and then once they were terrestrial, they really sort of exploded in diversity.

Life because it's so hard to do.

Yeah, I mean, your whole europhysiology has to accommodate oxygen instead and air instead of water, which is.

A big, big difference.

Can you imagine if it just the air just had floating jellyfish in it, just like puffing.

By flying, and it was like nothing that jellyfishing was having the face.

Now, what is it about terrestrial snails and slugs? Is it like a byom, like bring your own mass on land and then just like cover yourself in a moisturel air and you're good to go.

That lets them start to survive when it went in like arid conditions at all. So if you have a shell and your marine, then you have something you can pull into and keep yourself safe and from drying out. So it's like it had two different functions. If the first function in the marine realm or where they're living in the ocean was for protection, its secondary function was as as a to prevent desiccation, whether it was necessary for that organism when it first evolved or not.

So that allowed them This is why.

We call it preadapt which like I said, has some kind of problematic implications, but the idea is that they had this trade already and that trade ended up having a really important secondary function that allowed them to make this big transition onto land. So if you have a shell, your shell can be where you pull into and keep yourself from drying out. So that's what they do. So that's one of the reasons that that big evolutionary innovation could happen in the first place, that makes sense. But

Now, let's debunk some flint flamb is Are there any myths about snails or slugs that.

You're like, that is not the case, people.

What I don't know if i'd say now that I could think of, but there used to be quite a lot of snails and slugs used convergently by different native peoples of different lands for medicinal purposes. So people from like the Puritans, which were not native to North America, but the Puritans and Native Americans in say the American West, would use snails and slugs to cure things, cure like sore throats or ooh problems, other problems that were probably physical ailments.

Okay, like you got a souristic snail on it.

Yeah, which is interesting, and that's happened around the world, and there are some there is some research now. This is sort of like when folk wisdom ends up having there is some truth to it, right, like ethnobotany, like a lot of ethnobotany, Like what do people think plants do? Like, plants are full of chemicals, so yes, they do do things, and sometimes people often people have figured out how to use.

Plants to do things medicinally.

So there is some research now that slug and snail slime can be healing for human skin in various ways.

Right.

Yeah, And I because that is one of the most asked questions from Patreon is is snail goop really good for your skin?

Clement Lauren Edgart Crowe kabar Lei yep.

So there's a lot of South Korea has a lot of snail slime products, a lot of Southeast Asia has a lot of snail slime products or yes for everything from like curing acne scars to just general beautification.

So side note, A quick google opens the doors into the world of gleaming slime streaks and glistening promises of self repair and faded acney scars and hydrated under ibags.

If you're up for it.

There's a procedure called scar glow that involves thousands of tiny needle pricks into your face, followed by snail foot secretions oozed into your open wounds. It costs three hundred and seventy five dollars a session, partly because we'll pay for anything, apparently, and partly because the snails are meticulously cared for and receive daily showers with fresh water and

But and I did spend some time looking at the patents of some of these, so I am I'm not

So I don't really have an answer.

It does look like there is some promising research that slug or mostly snail slime can improve your skin snake.

It's funny though, because we talk about snake oil. But literally now if someone were like snail slime, yeah, someone now would be like, well, I could see how snake oil could be right, that's like it's a set mask. It would be like awesome, it's part of a ten step skincare system.

I think that the problem is, well, it's not safe to just put snails on your face because they can host parasites.

And I don't think that that.

I think that the ick factors a little too much for most people, even if they were clean snails. So that's sort of that's one thing. But then two for a lot of the face masks and creams, there.

Is no.

Regulated I mean, this is the thing with like what they call pharmaceuticals right there. There is no regulated amount that you have to have in a product to say that it is going to be effective. But they do it with the snail. That is the law Los Angeles wet sidewalk snail.

That's realal yep.

So the patent says, and you can look up there's

A probably protective measure.

I mean, if they're in imagine that that's not something that evolution is really put a big mark on for snails because they're usually not being spun around, right, so some but you know, to protect themselves in some way, they produce a bunch of and a net is collected and filtered somehow and then added to these products. And then they did test it in some various number of ways to see if it did seem to improve cell repair and things like that.

So if you're looking for like a less snaily, less expensive hack, check out something else with hyaluronic acid, which, if you remember from the Glycobiology episode about carbs, hyaluronic acid is just a sugar that can hold up to a thousand times its weight in water, and there's a lot of it in snail slime because they got a bit of gliding to do. So this next part is crazy. I didn't know this at all. So what is snail slime? It's mostly water.

It's mostly water, and it is a One way of describing it is as a liquid crystal. And this is outside of my realm of expertise. But there's ways that it can be sticky and fluid very quickly and move from sticky fluid to semi fluid, and that the ability to do that can put you in a category as a biological product called a liquid crystal.

Ps.

Liquid crystal means that the molecules follow orderly patterns like a solid, but it flows like a liquid. So another liquid crystal soapy water?

Who knew me? And it just helps for mostly mobility and protection. Yeah, that's right.

So you can as a snail or a slug, you could make multiple kinds of slime for various purposes. Right, so your moving slime would be different than your protection slime. Right, so, the cells on your foot would make slippery slimes you can move around, or very sticky slime to stick you to something. And then your body, right, the dorsal part of your body would make maybe chemical rich, protective, unpalatable slime.

It seems like risky to have essentially a trail of breadcrumbs leading to your location, Like hey, yeah, here's here's an actual map to find out where I'm writing. So there's yes, it does that.

There's sort of Maybe I could think of two reasons why that would be a good thing. One, it might advertise the chemicals that are in you. That would be so you could have anti predator slime in your foot slime. Two that says predator this I smell disgusting, or I smell extremely impalatable or something right that makes them. But not all slugs are unpalatable, like raccoons and skunks have a field day.

Well so so some of them aren't.

So I just watched a video of a raccoon eating slugs like they were a bag of stretchy gummy candy, and it was imagery that will stay with me for life. Don't watch it. Also, side note, don't eat any raw snails or slugs because they may carry rat lungworm, which is a worm that burrows into your brain and can

And it also can tell.

So if you're a snail or a slug, you might have trouble finding a mate, and your slime trail may be a path to you from somebody else who would be your potential mate. So it's like your breadcrumb trail. That's your romantic breadcrumb trail. Here I am because it's they have eyes on the top of tiny little eyestalks. They probably are not seeing very very well. They're probably all influenced. Most of their senses are probably pheromones. So what pheromones do they have? Do other snails have? And

Oh, oh, it happen when it rains.

Right. If you think of an environment where they're estivating or they're in like snail hibernation, for a while, or they're underground and their slugs and they come out at night and then they want to find somebody to mate with. They have to they have to find them, probably using these little pheromone trails.

And let's talk about their Martian googly eyes, because like it's so weird.

I feel like we're so used to it, but yeah, they're yeah weird. You have two sticks they grow out of your head from moment to moment, what the hell's going on?

And they can also pull them into their head and then pop them back out. And marine snails, most marine snails don't have that. Most marine snails their eyes are on their face, okay, and then they have little sticking things that are sort of like their sensory tentacles, right, but they don't have eyes on the end of them.

Right.

So if you ever see like cartoons, like, it's easy to tell who knows their snail biology by a cartoon, because terrestrial snails almost always have two sets, an upper optical set of tentacles and the lower sensories set of tentacles, and marine snails almost always have at least one set of tentacles that have no eyes on the top. Their eyes on there on their face, if you will, are on their head, And how are.

These terrestrial eyestalks even working? And also side note, don't they have crazy tongues? Yes, yes they do, Yes, they do.

Right.

So the eye is on a muscle.

And if you were to look at a snail and you were to poke at its eyestalk, it'll pull its eye in, but its eye is pendent of its eyestalk, so we can pull its eye in on a muscle first before the rest of the stalk. Oh right, So it's like having a foot in a sock, Like you could pull your foot out of your sock and your sock.

Is still there, so they can do that. Hey, kiddos, don't poke snail eyes.

Okay, all right, So they have I think an image forming eye, but there's no reason to think that they're making a lot of sense out of what they're seeing.

What about their weird tongues, Yeah, they're weird tongues.

So their tongues are called radula or one radula two ragually and I tell people.

It's like it's like a cat tongue.

So if you imagine if you have ever been licked by a cat, right, it's that really rough tongue, so their ragula is like a cat tongue, and all of those little the bit that makes it extremely effective are little like teeth, little teeth with it on the tongue, so it's like a strip that moves in and out, and the mouth kind of shoots it out and scrapes and pulls it back in, and shoots it out and scrapes and pulls it back in.

So a snail tongue is made up of hundreds to thousands of tiny little teeth that have different shapes and sizes depending on the species. So if you watch a video of a snail licking glass, it's like a tiny wet sarlac pit from the nineteen eighty three version.

Of Return to the Jedi. It's just like a whole lined with teeth. It's a miniature nightmare. Now, on the topic of arid horrors, what happens when a snail gets dry? You had mentioned hibernation, and I know this question, I feel like before I even knew I was doing this episode, But why can they sometimes just hang out, sealed off in their shell for like months?

Right, Well, that's one of the reasons that they're good at the snails that can do that are good at living in environments where they didn't evolve and that can be very hot and dry. That they survive because they can do that very thing. It's called estivation. So it's

A little hole as an air hole. Oh my god.

And then they can sit there and wait, I have one estimating, Like I'm looking at it right now.

It's sitting over there. I can show you. Yes, I see it in a jar, just like gone fishing. I love that. You just have a jar with a snail in it. How long has it been kicking it? So these have been here a couple of weeks. I gave them water.

They're just yeah, sure, I'll baby talk a gastropod. So what so a snail seals itself into its shell during hot or dry periods, kind of like how you would barricade yourself indoors during the summer in Arizona. And there's like a tiny little hole and they're sealed off slime wall kind of like a mail slot through which you would accept air or pizzas even though snails are fasting.

So they estivate for weeks to months, days to weeks, two months and then don't get hungry.

Well, I guess when they do.

I mean if they if they have no resources, they would just die eventually, right, they would just drown die.

But once they have rain, then they'll find.

Each other and mate and find something to eat and then go back to estivating.

So it's like there.

I guess once they have enough resources, they'll just go to sleep and like they'll slow down their metabolism and stay like that for Yeah, they can stay like that for a really long time, which also extends their their lives. Like people have asked how long do they live, and

Snail mail? I don't really care. Yeah, it's all right.

Yeah. Do you feel like as a malacologists who study snails, people expect you to get things back to them slower just on a subconscious level?

I would?

I wish that that were the case. That's that would be great if that were the case, because that's kind of how I operate, So you know what I mean, if it were that it was that the expectation would be that it was slower, that would be a good thing.

There have to be people who studied cheetahs and people are disappointed that they don't return emails faster, just subconsciously, you know what I mean.

That's right.

Can I hit you with some Patreon questions? Yeah, okay, sure, But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show.

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They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where Ologies gives our money, you can go to Aliward dot com and look for the tab Ologies gives back. There's like one hundred and fifty different charities that we've given to already, with more every single week. So if you need a place to go, donate a little bit of my but you're not sure where to go. Those are all picked biologists who work in those fields, and this ad break allows us to

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Okay, your questions, this is a rapid fire around. You can answer as fast as you want, Sarah question, great question. A few people ask us where do all the shells come from? Are they making them? Are they finding them? What the shell's going on making?

Yeah, they're making them. So I say that it's like a turtle.

Right, So a turtle makes its shell and it lives in its and it's attached to its shell, and it can't somehow like cast it off and get another one. A snail is in that sense exactly the same. Okay, it makes its shell when it's a little tiny baby, it has a tiny little shell.

As it grows, it adds to its shell. So it's like a turtle.

Like a turtle doesn't just it's not like naked when it's born and then finds a shell.

It's the same thing with snails. They make their shell.

So every shell that you've ever seen was made by a snail. And the only organisms that like find shells and then get new shells or hermit crabs, which are naked on their abdomen, right, So they are these weird little crabs that have this totally naked abdomen and then grab onto a shell and hold it because they need some sort of protection.

Nude hermit crabs, by the way, are one of the most sweetly revolting sites. Their butts look like a coiled, boneless finger. And then when they grow, they sometimes have to swap shells with other hermit crabs, and they line up in an orderly fashion and everyone at once moves a size up into the warm, freshly vacated shell of the one ahead. Now this is just a side note.

That's right. This is you're looking at my butt right now. It's like their.

House, like, yes, they carry their house on their back right as the saying goes yeah.

Dustin Mills wants to know. Are their fast snails? M Yes, fast in certain aspects.

Yes, Cone snails which are famous for having ConA toxins, the special toxins that they use.

To kill their prey.

The way that they do that is they have a radula, right, the feeding structure that is that has evolved to be a spear type shape, and they can in milliseconds shoot out this spear into fish, polykeat worms or other mollusks, and that process of shooting it, Like, if there's a fish, you've got to be pretty quick to such a fish. So a cone snail that eats fish can shoot out this barb in milliseconds and paralyze its prey a most instantaneously and then engulf it and eat it.

So that's fast. That's real fast.

Right.

Can you imagine being like, oh, what happened to Gary? And it's like he got taken out by a snail. It's so embarrassing. Yeah, I feel like, oh you lost.

Brooke Bosone asked a good question. What's a humane way to discourage snails from eating the things in my garden? Is there something like an axe body spray?

I can use it. We'll discuss them and get them to stop eating my plants. Oh, I wish there were. I wish there were.

You can pick them off by hand and put them somewhere else, But that's not really that's a very proximate solution.

Also, it's not emotional. You've got to be out there at three in the morning especial, right.

That's right, who's doing that?

No, you can humane no, not really beer like shallow dishes of beer. They're attracted to that and will sometimes drown themselves.

Not humane.

Your Garden is a Lifetime movie about a frat house tragedy.

Kyle Crows and Heather Crowd.

They're both asked what is it about beer that attracts snails and beer traps?

Why do they like it so much?

And have there been any studies to see if snails enjoy craft beer over domestic.

I don't know. I don't know why.

It could be that fermentation, something that is fermenting smells like something that is good to eat, right, So if you imagine your generalist snail and you're looking for something to eat, something that smells like it's dying or dead and sort of decomposing, which is not exactly what fermentation.

Is, but sort of similar.

Yeah, as I type this, I was drinking this vinegary kombucha and I kept picturing snails dying into it, which, if you ever wondered how to make kombucha.

Harder to swallow, just do that.

Also, I looked it up and apparently slugs do like the yeast in the beer. So if you want to spare a beer, some sugar water and baking yeast will do the trick. I watched this time lapse video of slugs just popping off at a beer trap, and a lot of them will take a sip and make off fine. They're like thanks, buye. But there are others who slip right into it like a bathtub filled with wine coolers and just blissfully surrender to the grim reaper right then and there.

Mike Kamanikowski, great question, is farming helix snails for escargo and environmentally sustainable form of agriculture? And do you eat snails cone snails?

Right? I don't so helix so he's talking about for ESCO. There's a couple of species that are, yeah, are good escargo snails that I have never eaten. One is our Los Angeles wet sidewalk snail. So in addition to making the slime that's used in snail beautification products, they also are a maybe second tier escargo snail. Okay, is it environmentally sustainable as a form of protein? I would say probably more than other forms of protein. I mean they can they can build up a lot of body.

Mass on very few ingredients.

They could also eat like refuse of from you know, they could eat. They could be instead of your your compost bin, you could have snails thriving and eating your compost, and then you could eat your snails. That was kind of how the corny whispers some wet side sidewalk snail was introduced to California in the first place.

Right, wasn't it gold Rush?

There was a Frenchman who in eighteen I mean some things, I'm not sure if it was for the gold Rush, could have.

Been fact check this story, and yes, is delightfully, endearingly, bizarreingly true.

A Frenchman in California who asked his someone in his family, his mother perhaps to send him snails from France to California because he wanted to have a supply of snails to eat, and so he made an enclosure for them so he could breathe these snails, to have them whenever he wanted. And the little babies are just millimeters big and crawled out of the mesh or presumably whatever structure he had for them. And then that was one of the ways that snails were first perhaps the first way

But yeah, you could.

I have a colleague at the museum who collects snails at night around Los Angeles and feeds them corn meal for a.

While to like clean out their.

System, and then I guess sautez them up, steams them however, and eats them.

My mom used to do that. My grandma, my great grandma non me, she used to do that.

She would send my mom and my aunt out to the graveyard with a burlap sack and they'd have to take the Muni in San Francisco with this dripping easy sack of and then she'd feed them cornmeal.

She was a North Beach was this like Italian grandma from North Beach Yealy lived in North Beach and that's where they that's where all the Italians live.

Yeah, and so my mom would would have to amazing, she said. She was mortified as a teenager. You know, she'd be taking this subway with a burlap sack full of just and then so do you.

But you don't eat gastropods.

I mean I have not not the escargo variety. But I have on a couple occasions. But it's not like I don't seek that out to eat rights for any particular reason.

It's just not really my really, my thing.

Not your jammed chewy yeah, very chewy skype. A scientist has a great question, Oh, is there any good reason that I should not have a giant African land snail as a pet?

Yes, Tina Fica, Yes there are many reasons. Okay, there are many. The only places that those snails, they're called giant African land snails, which are nicknamed gals gls.

So gals epitomize. The haters will say it's photoshopped meme. There is a picture going around of a woman cradling a huge snail, and it's so bunny like in scale, and with its two eyestalks, it really looks like you woke up into James and the Giant Peach alternate universe where all rabbits were replaced by snails, and it's so cute but also horrifying, and you'll find yourself just staring at it and questioning reality.

Gals are potentially highly, highly invasive, and highly destructive in environments where there isn't a cold winter that can kill them off. So yes, the short answer is you should absolutely not. And if you do have them, the answer is not, oh my gosh, I have them. I'm going to let them loose in like Echo Park and then I don't have them anymore. The answer is call like

Oh you have impunity.

Yes, I believe you are. Just you can say I have these, I'm not supposed to have them. I'm not going to let them loose in Griffith Park or anywhere else. I'm going to give them to you somebody who's going to deal with them right so that they do not become an agricultural pest. So it's like leaving a baby at a fire station. Yes, you are allowed. That's right, you are allowed to do that. You need to do

Like, oh yeah, that's a hell no.

So so yeah, there are reasons that for health reasons, you wouldn't necessarily want to have them.

I have an idea.

What if you just get a hairless chihuahua and you put baby oil on it and put a hat on it, and you pretend it's a gal.

You could That's right. I bet somebody has done that. I fixed it there, that's right.

So even though that hey, should I get a pet snail question maybe wasn't one hundred percent serious. Really though, like, nobody get one.

It's like a very slow paced movie about how.

The apocalypse started.

So spray some pam on a hairless cat and then make it a decorative fascinator.

Call it a day.

Okay, now that I fix the world's snail problems.

Let's wrap this up. And now, what is the suckiest thing about your job? Suckiest thing? I guess I wouldn't say.

It's sucky, but like a lot of jobs, there's a lot of sitting at my computer and doing writing and emailing and just just general like sit at your desk kind of work. There's a small part of the job that is going out and collecting or being in collections. So that's one of the cool things about being at a museum is that if I want to go into the field, as it were, my field site might be down the hall in the malcologic collection, right, so opening drawers in the collection. So that part is I always

And what is your favorite part about your job or do you have a.

Favorite moment in malacology where you discovered something or you were in Hawaii on a bluff and found a species, anything crazy like that happened.

I would I would say it's it's not one moment.

It's I think, like a lot of scientists, if you get to do the work that you like to do, and this sounds sentimental, and I don't mean it to sound to sound as sentimental as it's going to sound. But every day, almost literally every day, there is something

So it's just amazing. Oh that's great sentimental, No, I love it, Come on, gets snail mental. It's wonderful. It is amazing. Oh my god, thank you so good, You're welcome.

So just keep asking smart people stupid questions, because how else does anyone learn anything?

Ever?

Really, and just being curious is like the smartest thing you can do. Now. To learn more about jan Bendetti, you can see her in interviews with the ologies ichthyologist guest Chris Thacker. We all loved her on her NHM web series The Curiosity Show, and you can also follow along with the Citizens Science Malacology role call where they go out and count snails in LA. Just check out the hashtag snail Blitz. There's also the Slime Project at NHM dot org.

Now.

Ologies is on Twitter and Instagram at Ologies I'm on both at Ali Ward with one L and there's shirts, bathing suits, hats and tots and pins are at ologiesmerch dot com so sales support the making of the show. Thank you Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis for managing that. And you can join the Ologies podcast Facebook group for nice people in Weird Science that's moderated by Aaron Talbert and Hannah Liippo. Thank you admins. Thank you always to