Thoughts about snails

Did you know that freshwater snails evolved from land snails? Landsnails evolved from marine snails. The gills became adapted into simple lungs. When some of these land snails moved into freshwater environments they did not re-evolve the ability to breathe underwater, and so essentially just hold their breath.

~ by linoleumjet on December 7, 2005.

2 Responses to “Thoughts about snails”

  1. How long can they hold their breath (go without taking in new air)? Do they actually have lungs, or some other sort of organs that process the oxygen from the air? The image of snails with tiny mammalian lungs seems unlike to me, but I don’t know what an aternative would look like.

  2. They don’t have lungs like we do. I just turned to this not quite authoritative site and learned that gilled snails can also live in freshwater, interestingly.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

 
%d bloggers like this: