Bubble Snails!
Have some amazing photos to start your week
Marine gastropods - sea slugs and sea snails, basically - are staggeringly varied and hugely important in the marine ecosystem. Also, some of them - quite a lot of them - are beautiful.
If you found this on a beach, you might not think much of it:
That, however, is the shell of a Bubble Snail.
And the animals response for the creation of these little shells - specifically, bubble snails from the family Aplustridae for the purposes of this post - some of them look pretty amazing. But only if you see them alive, underwater, of course.
The animal that goes with the empty shell above is the Brown-lined Paperbubble:
Photo: Samuel Chow, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0
They carry their shells like little backpacks, but their bodies are generally too big to comfortably fit inside that shell - they can’t completely hide away inside it.
Here’s the Royal Paper Bubble (aka The Pink Bubble Snail):
Photo: Cricket Raspet, via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0
These little lovelies can look … well, lovely, but they’re not that cuddly. They’re active predators, mainly of worms.
Photo: kueda, via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0
Photo: Kevin Bourdon, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0
All else being equal, I think my favourites are probably the handful of species in the genus Micromelo. They’re pretty small, but make up for it in style:
Photo: emmasophsea, via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0
Extravagant petticoat action.
Photo: desertnaturalist, via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0
Photo: Dan Schofield, via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0
And of course, when their lives are done, all this extravagance goes away, and all that’s left for us to find is the mundane-looking shell, which we barely notice. Others might find it and very much notice it, though. Here’s a hermit crab in a Pink Bubble Snail shell:
Photo: Cricket Raspet, via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0
Beautiful snails! I wonder if people who live in the tropics with these incredible creatures are unimpressed by seeing such things all the time. Probably not, but for as much as I dislike the heat, the nature sure makes it worth going there.
We had an abundance of Eastern Mudsnails where I grew up in coastal Connecticut, USA so by contrast I find these bubble snail shells quite lovely. Not to bad mouth our local snail though, as perhaps as unappealing their shell is, they are very interesting little dudes to watch do their thing in the mudflats.