Several kinds of snails hibernate throughout the cold season of the year, while others remain active throughout the year. They protect their bodies with a delicate mucus covering, which keeps them from withering throughout the summer. This process is called estivation. The fact that they have lived for millennia is presumably due to the mechanisms described above. 2. Snails can live for a very long time. During Roman times in Paris and France, snails were eaten fried or grilled after soaking them in milk. It was a popular dish, served as a dessert or sweets. They have an average lifespan of about 5-7 years. When they have enough food, and the weather is satisfactory, they tend to live much longer. Some of them have been known to live up to 10 years. A shell-less animal is much more maneuverable and compressible, so even quite large land slugs can take advantage of habitats or retreats with very little space, retreats that would be inaccessible to a similar-sized snail. Slugs squeeze themselves into confined spaces such as under loose bark on trees or under stone slabs, logs or wooden boards lying on the ground. In such retreats they are in less danger from either predators or desiccation. Those are often suitable places for laying their eggs.

This structure protects the snail from the environment and even from predators. It is made up of calcium carbonate which makes it strong and remains that way as long as the snail consumes food with calcium.Usually, the feeding activity of a Roman snail will be during the night, but you can find them during early morning hours or rainy days. Lalli, Carol M., and Ronald W. Gilmer. "Pelagic Snails: The Biology of Holoplanktonic Gastropod Mollusks." Stanford University Press. 1989. Certainly, land snails are incredibly slow. Their forward speed depends on the species, but usually, it is between 0.5 and 0.7 inches per second. Its slowness is another feature that has made it famous, and some people have known how to play with it. For example, in many places in the UK, snail racing is organized! Can you imagine waiting for them to reach the finish line? It does not last as long as it may seem.

Both snails that have lungs and snails that have gills have diversified so widely over geological time that a few species with gills can be found on land and numerous species with lungs can be found in freshwater. Even a few marine species have lungs. An important part of the anatomy of this snail is a structure in the mouth similar to a tongue, which is called the radula. It has small teeth that allow snails to scrap the food before eating it. They don’t make sounds to lure each other like many types of animals do because snails don’t have the ability to hear. So they expel some chemicals to attract others ready to mate and use touching as a way of courting. Once the mating is over, they go in separate directions. The Australian trumpet snail is considered to be one of the biggest or possibly the biggest sea snail in the world. It has the potential to grow to remarkable lengths of over three feet. As a result, it has the longest shell of any known living snail species.The food of land snails goes through a mouth structure called the radula, which has several rows of tiny teeth inside. Some birds such as the Great Tit ( Parus major) carries snails in its plumage, a fact that suggests that these small gastropods can be transported from habitat to habitat in an unintentional way.