Animal · Germany, Austria, Switzerland
Roman snail
Helix pomatia — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The Roman snail carries its own house on its back, a pale spiral shell that can grow as wide as a small plum and weighs a fair bit. It is the biggest land snail with a shell that you are likely to meet in central Europe.
Picture credit: Herzi Pinki (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Syrio (CC BY-SA 4.0) · George Chernilevsky (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the Roman snail live?
Home: chalky woods, hedges and old vineyards.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Poland, Czechia, Hungary.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: shell 3 to 5 cm across. It weighs about 0.03 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
A Roman snail glides forward on one broad muscular foot and leaves a shiny track of slime behind it. On its tongue sit thousands of tiny teeth, and it uses them like a file to rasp soft, wilting leaves and algae. It moves at roughly seven centimetres a minute, so crossing a garden path is a proper journey. In June and July the snail digs a hollow in the soil and lays forty to sixty round white eggs there. Before winter it digs in again, pulls back into its shell and seals the opening with a lid of chalk that it makes itself. Under that lid it sleeps through the frost, and in spring it pushes the lid off and crawls out. In several countries the Roman snail is protected, so the rule is: look, count, photograph, but leave it where it is.
Find it on the globe
Roman snail is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How big does a Roman snail get?
The shell measures three to five centimetres across and weighs, with the animal inside, about thirty grams. Fully stretched out of the shell, the snail can be around ten centimetres long.
Where do Roman snails live?
They like damp, chalky places in central Europe: open woods, hedgerows, stream banks and old vineyards. They need lime from the soil, because a shell is built out of chalk.
Is it true that you may not collect them?
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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