Sometimes it’s the things you see but don’t really see that can be the most interesting—like snails. Who knew there was a special army of tiny land snails making their homes in the rich, moist limestone so common in the Shepherdstown area?
And before you say “Who cares?” let me say that before I walked with Dr. Tim, my new personal snail man, I too tended to view the critters with little interest and even less respect. But this all changed after walking a mile with Tim at a snail’s pace.
Dr. Timothy Pierce is assistant curator and section head of mollusks at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and he sure knows our snails.  During a short visit here, he ran into several dozen species and introduced me to many of them.  More important, he introduced me to the importance of snails in our ecosystem.
Land snails are particularly good at recycling calcium. Snails get calcium from the things they eat, then concentrate it in their shells. Their shells provide a home and keep their body moist and usually protect them from predators. But if that doesn’t work—meaning, they become some other critter’s dinner—they pass along the calcium through the food chain as they are consumed by predators, which include nematodes, beetle larvae, firefly larvae, mice, chipmunks, and even birds such as grouse and turkeys. If you eat wild turkey, thank a snail for your calcium.
The moist limestone-rich soil along the Potomac River and the many creeks in our area provide important habitat for snails. Snails and slugs are gastropods, which roughly translated means “stomach-foot.” Before you laugh again, the name makes a lot of sense because snails move about by using a muscular structure on the bottom of their abdomen that’s called a foot. You have probably seen the slime trails that snails and slugs leave behind. That slimy mucous helps the snail to slide along as its foot propels it forward in a wavelike motion.
As we walked along the Potomac River and Antietam Creek, Tim quickly sprang into action and began finding and identifying different snails with the detail, excitement and enthusiasm that only a knowledgeable and gifted scientist—or maybe a proud parent—could have. As Tim searched the leaf litter, he shouted out names like Gastrocopta armifera! And “Strobilops labyrinthicus! Maybe you know them as the armed snaggletooth snail and maze pine cone snail.
After our walk Tim said, “I am particularly excited about Punctum minutissimum (small spot snail), which at 1 millimeter in diameter is one of the smallest land snails in North America, so finding it is a challenge.” He added, “The Glyphyalinia cumberlandian is an interesting snail because it looks very similar to Glyphyalinia raderi, which is an extremely rare snail.” These species that he field-identified were only a few of the dozens of snails that Tim found during his short visit to our area.
Tim’s enthusiasm became contagious as I learned what this small creature means in the greater scheme of things. Land snails are an important piece of the ecosystem in our area and play a valuable role in the overall diversity and viability of an ecosystem. Most land snails in the area are either herbivores or detritovores, meaning that they eat plants or decaying matter. More than 1,000 species of land snails live in North America north of Mexico.
As you can imagine, land snails do not travel great distances over their lifetimes. They stay close to home. This means that snails can be good indicators of the environmental health and history of a particular area.
It’s always fun to explore familiar places with people who can teach you new things. You see the place through a new lens. The opportunity to learn more about our natural surroundings provides us with a better understanding of our environment as a whole. So reconsider the snail. You probably have a few in your backyard, going about their daily lives in anonymity, but if you take time, you may discover a fascinating new world. Maybe even meet a rare Glyphyalinia raderi.
Thank you, Dr. Tim, for helping me see a bit of the Shepherdstown world that I probably would not have found on my own.
To find out which local snails are edible and to get answers to other infrequently asked questions about snails, go to www.Carnegiemnh.org/mollusks/index.htm