“On the E/V Nautilus, an exploration ship manned by the not-for-profit Ocean Exploration Trust, the organism’s “ball sort of unfolded into two folds”, said Susan Poulton, a spokesperson for the group, in a call from the ship.
“It revealed a foot and rhinophores, which are these ear-like structures, and you see a sort of proboscis come off the back of it,” she said. “That’s when it clearly became a gastropod of some kind.””
Today we learned that conches, the sea-dwelling mollusks who live inside those big, beautiful conch seashells in warm tropical waters, peer out at the world with cartoonish eyes on tiny eyestalks. They see you. They see everything. And what’s more, they can regenerate their peepers should they happen to lose one or both of them.
“One1976 paper dug into the specific behind these animals’ alien eyestalks. Sitting at the tips of long stalks, they contain retinas with both sensory cells and colored pigment cells. But the story gets weirder because obviously, it gets weirder. After amputating the conchs’ eyes, a fully-formed replacement took its place 14 days later. Humans, we really are losing this evolutionary game.”
But wait, that’s hardly the only surprising set of eyes under the sea. Scallops have eyes too, LOTS of them:
Blaesospira is a genus of land snails with an operculum, terrestrial gastropod mollusks in the family Pomatiidae. This is a land snail species endemic to Cuba.
I’m not saying Barack Hussein Obama is responsible for this, and I’m not even necessarily saying it’s Hillary Clinton’s fault, but I do think this is something Congress needs to look into, because it’s obviously not a coincidence.
This snail sometimes goes by the name sandhill snail or vineyard snail and is a common invasive species worldwide. Although it originally comes from Europe, it has become established in the United States, South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere. These snails have the tendency to climb and cluster together in massive congregations and they can be a serious pest where they become established.
This medium-sized snail can be found on the eastern coast of the United States and part of eastern Canada. Their shell has a deep, open umbilicus (the umbilicus is the reverse side of the coil that looks like a hole and the word umbilicus is also another word for a belly-button, which the shell umbilicus somewhat resembles). These snails are predatory and will eat worms, slugs, and other snails but they will also eat any detritus they come across.
Peripatetic scrubsnails have a wide distribution including the southeast part of the United States and eastern Mexico. They are fairly small snails and the attractive light-colored banding is common in this genus.
This snail is in the family Polygyridae. Within Polygyridae there are many snails that have an interesting shell feature - the presence of teeth. Teeth are shell protrusions near the aperture of the shell. It’s theorized that these teeth offer some protection to the snails that have them by making it harder for predatory arthropods to climb into the shell and eat the snail. Snails in the genus Daedalochila have some of the most extreme examples of teeth. The apertures of their shells are so convoluted it’s a wonder that the snail can even emerge from its own shell.
While the vast majority of land slugs and snails that many people are familiar with are in the order Stylommatophora, leatherleaf slugs (and pancake slugs) are in a different order. The order they are in is the order Systellommatophora. There are some key differences between these groups. Gastropods in the order Stylommatophora have the ability to invert their tentacles (turn them inside out when they retract) and they also undergo a process called torsion when they are embryos. Torsion results in the internal organs of the slug/snail getting twisted around, resulting in the anus being near the head. Systellommatophora slugs instead have their anus in the conventional place at the end of the body and they also lack the ability to turn their tentacles inside out.
The Florida leatherleaf is a type of leatherleaf slug. These slugs are called leatherleaf slugs because they are leathery to the touch rather than slimy (an adaption that helps them avoid drying out). They also have a flattened appearance and the mantle runs the length of the body. Consequently, they look a bit like a leaf or a pancake.
This snail is originally native to Europe, but it can now be found elsewhere in the world as an invasive species. There are two snails in the genus Cepaea that are commonly confused with one another, the grove snail or brown-lipped snail (Cepaea nemoralis) and the white-lipped snail (Cepaea hortensis). Distinguishing the two species is only possible by examining the color of the lip of the shell. The brown-lipped snail has a brown lip and the white-lipped snail has a white lip. Both species are extremely variable in appearance in shell color and banding, but the lip color will always be the same for each species. Consequently, identification can only be done on adult snails that possess a lip. Juveniles are impossible to identify.
The crenulate horn is a type of prosobranch snail from south Florida and the Florida keys. Prosobranch snails share many similarities with aquatic snails, such as eyes at the base of the antennae and the presence of an operculum.
The Banded Caracol is a medium-sized snail from Puerto Rico (‘caracol’ means snail in Spanish). Interestingly, a small population of Banded Caracols have established themselves in the Miami area in Florida. How they made it from Puerto Rico to Florida remains unclear. One theory states that some were attached to pieces of trees that were ripped out of the ground and blown across the ocean via hurricane winds. Whether or not this is actually possibly is disputed. These snails are tree snails and their diet is believed to consist primarily of the fungi that grow on the trees they live. Although the Florida population is nonnative, they aren’t considered to be invasive since they appear to be causing no negative side effects to the environment.
