Slimed

Any time we get a bit of rain, we get a sudden irruption of Garden Snails (Cornu aspersum) on the walls of the house. They slither their way around, looking for plant material to nibble — and for other snails to mate with, presumably! They can be a problem in a garden (or agricultural field) if their numbers grow high enough, but that hasn't been an issue here yet. That might be because we have a number of Song Thrushes in the neighborhood, and they're well-known gourmands of snails. We do find slime trails regularly across the paving stones near the driveway, but whether the snails or their cousins the slugs have made them, we're not sure.

Like most land snails, the Garden Snail is a hermaphrodite, producing both male and female gametes. They fire love darts at each other during the mating process, though we haven't seen any evidence of those. These "darts" are covered with mucus that appears to help prime the recipient's female sex organs to receive the donor's sperm. They mate for hours (!!) then produce up to 80 tiny, pearly-white eggs, which they lay into sheltered areas such as cracks in the soil.

The Garden Snail (dubbed the "Brown Snail" in parts of the New World) is native to Europe, from the British Isles south to the Mediterranean, as well as northern Africa and east to Asia Minor; it has been widely introduced (intentionally and otherwise) to much of the rest of the world. While sometimes considered a pest, as it is primarily a herbivore, it is also consumed by a variety of birds, mammals (including humans), reptiles, amphibians and insects. In other words, it definitely has a place in our wildlife garden.