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A snail is a shelled gastropod. The name is most often applied to land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs. However, the common name snail is also used for most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have a coiled shell that is large enough for the animal to retract
The anatomy of a common air-breathing land snail: much of this anatomy does not apply to gastropods in other clades or groups. Snails are distinguished by an anatomical process known as torsion, where the visceral mass of the animal rotates 180° to one side during development, such that the anus is situated more or less above the head. This ...
A species of sea snail in its natural habitat: two individuals of the wentletrap Epidendrium billeeanum with a mass of egg capsules in situ on their food source, a red cup coral. A sea snail Euthria cornea laying eggs. Sea snails are slow-moving marine gastropod molluscs, usually with visible external shells, such as whelk or abalone.
A molluscivore is a carnivorous animal that specialises in feeding on molluscs such as gastropods, bivalves, brachiopods and cephalopods.Known molluscivores include numerous predatory (and often cannibalistic) molluscs, (e.g.octopuses, murexes, decollate snails and oyster drills), arthropods such as crabs and firefly larvae, and, vertebrates such as fish, birds and mammals. [1]
From shallow waters to the deep sea, the open ocean to rivers and lakes, numerous terrestrial and marine species depend on the surface ecosystem and the organisms found there. [1] The ocean's surface acts like a skin between the atmosphere above and the water below, and hosts an ecosystem unique to this environment.
Molluscs are second only to arthropods in numbers of living animal species [20] —far behind the arthropods' 1,113,000 but well ahead of chordates' 52,000. [18]: Front endpaper About 200,000 living species in total are estimated, [ 3 ] [ 24 ] and 70,000 fossil species, [ 17 ] although the total number of mollusc species ever to have existed ...
Unlike other sea snails, or even land snails, sea butterflies float and swim freely through the ocean, traveling along with the currents.This has led to a number of evolutionary adaptations in their bodies, including complete or near-complete loss of the shell and the gill in several families.
Animals are multicellular eukaryotes, [note 1] and are distinguished from plants, algae, and fungi by lacking cell walls. [1] Marine invertebrates are animals that inhabit a marine environment apart from the vertebrate members of the chordate phylum; invertebrates lack a vertebral column. Some have evolved a shell or a hard exoskeleton.