some type of adult girl

bogleech:

prince-atom:

bogleech:

a-book-of-creatures:

vintagewildlife:

A small Gonaxis snail about to kill and eat a giant African land snail
By: R. Tucker Abott
From: Natural History Magazine
1951

How? @bogleech how does this work

It will actually grab on tightly to the bigger snail’s exposed body, gluing itself with its slime, so that it gets pulled inside of the prey’s shell and just start eating it alive. It can’t finish an entire snail that big on its own but the smell will attract more of its own kind and other scavengers; these were successfully used to eradicate over a million land snails from Hawaii but unfortunately they also fed on rare native snails; another predator, the rosy wolf snail, was more efficient but drove many of the native snails extinct in only a couple of years.

To be fair the African land snails will eat smaller snails so the Hawaiian snails were doomed either way until anyone noticed and put the remaining 1% of species in captive breeding programs

There’s also a predatory land snail that straight up secretes shell-dissolving acid to kill bigger species

*scribbles notes* the only giant snail in D&D has clubs on its head and hits you to death. These are much scarier.

If you like those, some sea snails also do the acid thing to make a little hole but they’re quite large, strong snails that attack smaller prey so once they make the hole they can suck all the other snail’s guts out.

Some conchs have a thick axelike blade on a short powerful stalk

Cone snails not only have a deadly venomous organic harpoon but some release a cloud of *insulin* as a weapon causing their prey to go into shock

Moon snails have extremely broad flat bodies so they can just smother prey like a big slimy blanket

Benthic hooded nudibranches disguise themselves as rotten seaweed to bush prey with a mouth that can stretch into a huge membranous net

“vampire” sea snails drain blood from sleeping hosts with a proboscis so long the rest of the snail can stay out of sight

Some intertidal snails just hide under the sand in large dense numbers and pop out to swarm over and eat anything that can’t get away such as beached fish and any wounded, sick or dying creatures

A whole lot of carnivorous swimming snails are just so transparent you can only see their shell and clump of organs, which are so tiny compared to the rest of the body that basically it’s a larger invisible predator disguised as a smaller animal (some squids and even fish also do this)

And some carnivorous chitons, which are not snails but are also slow moving shelled mollusks, form a false “cave” by lifting the flattened front of their body and eating whatever smaller animals seek shelter

(via witchydarling)