News Animals

Snail slime does many jobs thanks to calcium

Snails remix their slime’s chemistry to shift between mucus types, from sticky to slippery

A yellow-and-black grove snail (Cepaea nemoralis) crawls over a wet brown rock

Land snails like the grove snail (Cepaea nemoralis) (shown) can make five different kinds of mucus. The slimes’ properties are fine tuned by the snail for specific functions for life in the slow lane.

Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces

By Jake Buehler

Not all slime is created equal. A species of land snails tweaks its slime’s chemical recipe to create five different varieties of mucus, using each for a particular job.