#helix lucorum

[kedreeva]

Mlem mlem mlem mlem

Dinner with a friend!

[power-handmaiden]

Day 352: Rufous

Pet of u/MangoTheQuirkyCat on reddit!

[iris-polaris]

🟪 ANIMAL OF THE DAY: Helix lucorum. a type of Snail found in Europe and the Middle East. uses "love darts" to stab their waifus and husbandos as part of their Mating Ritual. this is not me being Silly. this is what they do. the darts are made out of chitin (bug skin). romantic

[kedreeva]

snex (snail sex)

Look!!!! I caught the love dart in a photo!!!

[kedreeva]

Foxglove trying to get over a small stick

[kedreeva]

Peony is 2/3 of a Dr Pepper can long

[kedreeva]

"if I fits, I sits" now applying to snails i guess

[kedreeva]

if you like snail sex you might enjoy the short story

“The Snail Watcher” by Patricia Highsmith

I don't think I would say I "like" it so much as I am excited that my snails I would like to breed were doing it. This kind of behavior (mating) is, understandably, exciting for any breeder of any kind of animal to see their animals do, so they know it's working so far.

But it's exceptionally exciting because these snails are rarely kept in captivity because their care is basically unknown. There's no resources online for how to keep them. There's even fewer resources on how to breed them. When I went looking I found next to nothing. A couple of forum posts where people had been unsuccessful or barely successful, and a research paper on wild reproduction habits, but little to no environmental information included, just breeding season and number of eggs laid. (and it turns out, a lot of the older info i WAS able to find about care was wrong; and explains why theirs were not breeding).

Which means I'm winging their care based on what I was able to find of their native habitat range. Hot, dry forest with thick, woody topsoil. It's been a lot of trial and error. When I first got them, they climbed to the top of the enclosure, and sealed themselves to the glass, and estivated for weeks. They were in a tank that would have been great for several other snail species, but they didn't like it. They HATED the coco coir.

It wasn't until I moved them into the tall tank (a 29g) with completely different soil (8" deep, the bottom ~3 inches was still coir/soil, but the top was heavily tree fern soil, bark chips, and ground dried leaves from my yard that had been baked to kill off anything) and cover (no moss, just more dead leaves) that they really opened up and started moving around nearly every night, eating again, and yeah, mating.

These two are the largest ones from each clutch, the two that did the best. They're supposed to take 3 years to mature, but it's only been 2. I don't have eggs yet, and even if they're successful I won't see babies for a couple months most likely, but if they ARE successful, then I will have successfully reproduced them in captive keeping for real.

It's still not perfect. Their shells aren't perfect, which means they still need some diet adjustment. I suspect it was actually a lack of UVB/vitamin D3; I JUST added a UVB lamp to one side of the long enclosure they're in when I added the lizards, and they're getting some of the lizard food, so we'll see if it helps the next generation.

So yes! I'm very excited to see the snail sex. But, not because it's snail sex. Because it means I'm not totally fucking up trying to keep a snail species hardly anyone keeps, with no real guidance available (yet) on how to do it correctly.