A Microscopic Look At Snail Jaws | Natural History Museum

Skip to main content

Breadcrumb

1. Stories
2. A Microscopic Look at Snail Jaws

BE ADVISED: On Saturday, February 21, the Natural History Museum will be closing at 4 pm. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will host the LAFC vs. Inter Miami soccer match, with kickoff at 6:30 pm. This event will impact traffic, parking, and wayfinding in the area due to street closures. Please consider using public transportation or rideshare.

BE ADVISED: The Natural History Museum is not participating in SoCal Museums Free-for-All on Sunday, February 22.

A Microscopic Look at Snail Jaws

Have you ever wondered what the inside of a snail's mouth looks like?

By: Jann Vendetti, Ph.D. Share: Share page on facebook Tweet this page Brazilian Snail eating lettuce

Have you ever wondered what the inside of a snail's mouth looks like? The anatomy involved in land snail and slug feeding is fascinating. Well, I’d like to guess that it is more fascinating than you’d expect if you’ve ever thought about snail and slug feeding in the first place. Snails and slugs have evolved to eat just about everything; they are herbivorous, carnivorous, omnivorous, and detritivorous (eating decaying waste from plants and other animals). There are specialist and generalist species that eat worms, vegetation, rotting vegetation, animal waste, fungus, and other snails.

Thousands of Microscopic Teeth! Snails and slugs eat with a jaw and a flexible band of thousands of microscopic teeth, called a radula. The radula scrapes up, or rasps, food particles, and the jaw cuts off larger pieces of food, like a leaf, to be rasped by the radula. To understand what the single jaw and radular band look like in a terrestrial snail, two Museum interns (from Glendale Community College), Ala Babakhanians and Richard Laguna, photographed a common European Garden Snail (Cornu aspersum) eating a film of cornstarch and water on a piece of glass. This clever method was inspired by the Snail's Tales blog.

Underside of Cornu aspersum showing the single reddish-brown jaw of the mouth. Close up of the open mouth of Cornu aspersum showing the jaw and the pale-colored ribbon of teeth called the radula.

A Close Look at a Slug's Rasping Radula The only way to truly appreciate the microscopic teeth of the radula is to look at them under a microscope. To do this, Ole Willadsen, another Glendale Community College intern at NHMLA, dissected out the radula from a non-native slug found on Sunset Boulevard.

Limacus sp., non-native slug found in Los Angeles by Cedric Lee

The radula was imaged using the Museum's scanning electron microscope (SEM), which creates an extremely detailed and highly magnified picture of the specimen examined.

SEM image of central radular teeth Limacus sp. specimen shown above. SEM image of marginal radular teeth Limacus sp.

The fascinating feeding anatomy of snails and slugs is also helpful in determining their species identity, if and when that is in question. Since we sometimes don’t know the identity of non-native species we encounter in Los Angeles, the size and shape of their single jaw and thousands of radular teeth can be as informative as they are beautiful.

**Can you hear a snail eating? Yes! Check out Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s book The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.

If you’d like to be involved in efforts to document and protect L.A.’s biodiversity, check out our Community Science program. Or you can donate to the Urban Nature Research Center.

(Posted by: Jann Vendetti)

Think Small With SEM Seeing the big picture with tiny specimens and one powerful scanning electron microscope Read more Secret Gardens Glendale Community College student interns working behind the scenes are unearthing the hidden worlds of NHM’s Nature Gardens, plucking pollen from its greenery, tucking the fine powder under the Scanning Electron Microscope, and revealing the smallest bits of nature you’ve ever seen. Read more Share: Share page on facebook Tweet this page