Snails are what kind of animals

Turritella plebia ssp. Serpulorbis granifera Say , View of a number of individual with uncoiled whorls intertwined. Calpytraea aperta Solander. Calyptraea aperta Solander. Ecphora tricostata Martin. Scaphella virginiana Dall. This page tagged with: Miocene. The eggs of some species contain a large yolk.

Development of the eggs may be within the body, or the eggs may be expelled to develop externally. Eggs develop into larvae. Those species that will develop a shell start it while larvae. As the animal develops, it adds another curl of shell, ending in an opening from which the head and foot of the animal emerge. Gastropods feed on very small things. Most of them scrape or brush particles from surfaces of rocks, seaweeds, animals that don't move, and other objects.

For feeding, gastropods use a radula, a hard plate that has teeth. Slugs and snails belong to the Phylum Mollusca and are more closely related to octopi than insects. Mollusks are a large and diverse group of animals of worldwide distribution. The slugs and snails are much like some insects in their biology.

Their damage to ornamental plants resembles that done by caterpillars or wireworms. Slugs and snails are in a subgroup called the Gastropoda, the members of which have a head, a ventral muscular foot, and a shell internal in slugs and external on snails. Approximately species of land snails and about 40 species of slugs are now known from North America.

Most of these have been introduced accidentally. With few exceptions, native species are solitary in habit and do little or no damage. The introduced slugs and snails are usually gregarious and may cause serious damage as they build up large populations in a local area.

In many places, slugs and snails have caused as much damage as insect pests. Eradication and control of slugs and snails is difficult and costly.

Being a mollusk means lacking an internal skeleton and bones, but snails are not unprotected. They have been able to continually evolve to survive the conditions around them which many researchers find to be very fascinating. Gastropods belong to the phylum Mollusca or Mollusks a classification of invertebrate animals with a soft unsegmented body, sometimes covered with an exoskeleton or shell.

This phylum, Mollusca, includes animals like squids, octopuses, clams and cuttlefishes among others. Snails and slugs are both Gastropods. Therefore they are closely related, regardless the fact that slugs lack a protective shell. The most striking physical feature of snails is their spiral shell that they load on the back. It is a hard structure composed of calcium carbonate, which protects their soft body and internal organs.

Among these organs is their lung because land snails breathe air from the atmosphere that then passes into a lung to get the oxygen; this is one of the main differences with aquatic snails, that only a few species of water snails breathe air. You will find snails everywhere around the world. In fact, Gastropods range second, only behind insects when it comes to the number of named species. As an obvious result of this, they are found in many locations, living in a very diverse type of habitats and even having particular feeding habits.

The Earth offers a vast diversity of habitats for snails. Surely you have found tiny snails under a stone, but also climbing some stem or leaf of a plant. They can survive in natural environments or places frequented by humans, such as public parks and gardens. Their quantity and diversity are vast. There are anything between 85, and , mollusks of which percent are gastropods.