Snail

Identification - Achatina fulica, east African land snail!

A very nice response to yesterday's butterfly macro. A most unusual situation with the proboscis droplet. It had a few of you confused, but I took the shot and it had me scratching my head too, trying to interpret what I was looking at.

I was out of the house at 07:00 this morning. The roads were wet and the sky was cloudy, so a bit optimistic for finding a quality blip, definitely not bug weather. But I was keen to inspect my blipping grounds after yesterday's storms.

There was nothing in the Google news and so no big problems were caused. There was no rubbish over the paddy fields, so the flood water was confined to the stream. It just shows how bad it was when the stream banks were breached. The path was not damage free however, three banana trees bearing fruit were brought down under the sheer weight of the falling rain and wind, although we tend not to get the high winds that are taken for granted back in the UK.

I was right, not much blip material around, but there are always a few damsels and dragons, the spiders can't go anywhere and I got a nice shot of a skipper butterfly, so I won't whinge. But, I was most taken by this snail shot. I have only blipped two snails before and so it is probably a good a time as any to put out snail 2013.

Slugs and snails, it is obvious that they are closely related, in fact a lot closer than you may think. All slugs contain the hardware necessary to manufacture a shell, but that gene has been switched off. Through the eons of time, evolution has switched the gene on and off in some species.

Both versions are successful and so survive to reproduce. The snail with its obvious protection, the slug with its ability to squeeze into the smallest of crevices is also able to gain protection and find better protected sites for its eggs. Slugs and snails will be around for a long time to come, given that 'man' comes to his senses and doesn't mess everything up!

Dave