Snail painted on a wall in the Haut-Koenigsbourg castle, France
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titsay
Three Goblin Art
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@theartofmadeline
Cosmic Funnies
Jules of Nature
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Xuebing Du
tumblr dot com
styofa doing anything
$LAYYYTER
Show & Tell

if i look back, i am lost

JVL
Mike Driver
d e v o n
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trying on a metaphor

blake kathryn

seen from United States
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@cringeyamethystsnail
Snail painted on a wall in the Haut-Koenigsbourg castle, France
Sundial snail!
Architectonica Perspectiva
Lookie who I saw on a walk yesterday :)
Big frien :)
BIG FRIEN :)
Iberian Spadefoot (Pelobates cultripes), family Pelobatidae, northern Portugal
photograph by Bob Ferguson
Vietnamese Mossy Frog (Theloderma corticale), family Rhacophoridae, Vietnam
photograph by Diep Dai Tung
Please enjoy this snail measuring tape i got at a garadge sale today
It's called a sneasuring tape, get it right.
Just showed this to my mom, she wants one now
You've been visited by the late night porch snail, patron saint of:
dewdrops
taking the scenic route
residues (all kinds)
not getting stepped on
Snoap dish
Finished snoap dish. Copper wash you never disappoint.
pride flags should have spirals
Like snails. espeically like polymita snails
Happy Spring Equinox!
snail heraldry commission!!!!
Today's snail: Tortulosa tortuosa
(source)
Polymita Picta ! ((@_
Have you seen the Cuban painted snail (Polymita picta)?
I have now
Yes, in photos/videos
Yes, irl
I'm not sure
I think we’re really not appreciating limpets enough. They’re just a snail with extra shell and they’re equally adorable
why are their little faces so cute
what the hell
i can't stand it, i may explode soon unless i stop looking at them
Absolutely enamoured with this snail mug I got yesterday....
A snug of snoffee
so happy and free
this is going to be a silly reblog but i have kind of a fixation on animal qualia and the idea of an animal's umwelt, so i ended up wondering whether pudding was actually "enjoying" this.
which meant i went and read about snail brains.
here's the bad news, at least by human standards:
snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.
pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.
snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."
so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.
and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.
snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."
if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.
pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.
i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.
snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?
so maybe the point isn't "this is sad because he can't enjoy it," but "this is a reminder that minds come in radically different shapes, and value doesn't have to be rich to be real."
[ID: A Reddit post on r/snails titled "Showing Pudding the world". Attached is a photo of a snail held out in the photographer's hand towards a view of an overcast sky and an ocean. Plants are visible from the bottom of the photo. The snail is stretching its head out upwards past the photographer's fingers. /end ID]