Snail News

My snails and I are having happy times right now. I took advantage of my parents, who brought me their old juicer on the graduation visit and even though, as my boyfriend described it, "it is a bastard one to clean", I undertake this task after every juicing and I found that the snails absolutely love the leftovers - especially carrot, beetroot and apple mash with some water to make it more moist. Thanks to this, I began feeding my snails more often, spraying them more often and, of course, giving them a source of calcium more often and it has already brought pretty impressive results. My younger snails that have seemed to stop growing have grown visibly in the past few weeks. There is still no change in my biggest (Jedi) or secong biggest (Adéla), but maybe it is too late for them and they have reached their terminal size. After all, Jedi's size is quite impressive.

Two of my "little" snails. The lip of the shell is where the snails grow. Mine were
clearly a bit damaged, but they managed to repair themselves - see the lighter
stripe on the edge? That is new and healthy shell.

As for my aquatic snails, I have some bad news. My apple snail died last week, I am not sure why, but I guess that low temperature was a big factor - it was doing greatly in summer and then from autumn on it started looking bad, stopped growing and so on. I am feeling sorry for it, but I am keeping the shell and the operculum and I composted the body on the school compost. On the other hand, there are many smaller snails that are doing well and breeding like crazy. They were stowaways on some plants that a friend gave me - and they survive almost everything. So far, I have not found a thing that would harm them. I keep many little ones in an aquarium at home (pictures below) and many bigger ones in a five-litre pickle jar from the school canteen in our staff room (and I already have a pending reservation for other jars from the school kitchen when they come - more snails and Daphnia keeping is planned).

The aquatic snails that hatched recently. They are still very small, but crawling around the tank happily