Mortality & Disinfectant

We have suffered quite high mortality in the last few weeks. The literature suggests that we should expect a mortality of 25% and we must be getting close to that number now. I had assumed that this mortality would take place when they were very small but we lost very few then. The ones that seem to be dying are those which are small - about the size of a little fingernail. Perhaps this is just the time that they die if they are going to?

Up to now we have been cleaning the snails and their enclosure with water. We have a 5 litre hand spray that we use for the outdoor enclosure, and the small plastic box we just sponge down. I have now however taken delivery of a disinfectant to use on both enclosures. It is called Ark Klense and is designed for cleaning animal enclosures without harming the animals. Snails are regarded as pests by most people and many cleaning fluids will kill or injure them. Ark Klense is supposedly safe - although I will still use it sparingly. Snails do suffer from parasites, especially in farmed colonies so cleaning with disinfectant should help prevent this. The disinfectant itself was hard to get, I could only get it on line, and I bought it eventually from the RSPB website shop.

Large enclosure

Now that the danger of a late frost has passed we have moved some of our snails into our larger enclosure or the Snailarium. The Snailarium is a home made construction. We bought a wire compost bin and lined it with plastic. The top is hinged. The bottom of the compost bin was open so we have mounted the whole structure in a wooden base. This we filled with soil.

So far we have transferred about 15 snails. We move them when they are about thumb-nail size.

The problems of the Snailarium are now becomming evident. The Compost bin was a metre in height. We wanted this size as a metre cube will theoretically support 900 snails without any problems resulting from overcrowding. However it also means that it is very difficult to reach the bottom of Snailarium from the edge.

My second mistake to lay turf at the bottom of the Snailarium. My thinking was that this would be more comfortable and natural for the snails. I also thought the grass would break up any slime trails. When I put the grass in it was litle more than a centimetre or so high. I failed to appreciate that buy placing it in what was effectively a greenhouse would encourage it to grow. The base of the Snailarium now has a lush carpet of long grass. The snails love it, they snuggle down and are impossible to find. I am not sure how we will find them to get them out when they are big enough to eat!

Selection

Some of the snails have now grown quite big, about the size of a thumb nail. They are clearly too big for the Propagator so need to be moved to the larger enclosure outside. However, we are afraid that should we get a late frost they may not survive so we don't want to put them outside until after the May Bank Holiday.

So we have bought a crate to keep them in until then.

The next problem was selecting the onese to be moved. Initially we only moved the largest, but the propagator was in need of a thorough clean, not just a wash and a wipe of the lid, but we felt the time had come to change the soil. So, we moved the entire flock (a flock of snails?) from the propagator to the new crate. We were then able to thoroughly clean and wash out the propagator and put clean compost in the bottom.

We returned the smallest snails afterwards and gave them fresh feed and some lettuce. This also enabled us to count them. Two dead empty shells were found during the whole process, but 77 snails were returned to the propagator. There were ten who were big enough to remain in the crate, these we gave lettuce and a juvenile food mix, but no soil.

The Great Escape

Now that the sanils are bigger we need to pay more attention to cleaning them. When they were very little it was just a case of wiping down the propogator, now the propogator needs thorough washing and cleaning. We have decided that we actually need two propogators: so that as well as cleaning the plastic we can transfer the snails onto clean soil.

When we are doing the cleaning we have to be careful that the snails do not get away. Snails, in contradiction to popular myth, are fast, Very fast. They are also inquisitive. If there is somewhere to explore snails will explore it. Fiona, my wife tends to do the rounding up. Her fingers are more slender than mine and she has a more delicate touch. I am Ok with the larger ones but I worry about squashing the small ones. Fiona also has to save the snails from the attention of our three year old daughter, Amy, who takes a great deal of interest in them. Whilst this is going on I replenish the petri dishes that have the food on, wash the green leaves that we give them to eat and also clean out the perspex top to the propogator.

Because it is my job to wash the propogator I feel responsible for the great escape last night. The lid of the propogator has a vent on it in the form of a sliding switch over three large holes. We keep the switch open, but only by a fraction. However last night the vent was fully open. The holes are sufficiently big to let the smaller snails out. We found six snails on the outside. They hadn't gone far, snails will not go too far from a source of food unless it it to another source of food, but we did need to round them up and return them to the propogator. This included me on hands and knees with a torch looking for escapees.

Snail Pedigrees

Our snails are Helix aspersa maxima - or as they are now called Cornu aspersum maxima – They are related to the common garden snail which is Helix aspersa/Cornu aspersum., but they grow about half as big again. In France these snails are known as Gros Gris whilst the Garden Snail is called Petit Gris.

You could eat the snails out of your garden.

Strictly speaking they are not Escargot, Escargot are Helix pomatia. Sometimes called the Roman or Burgundian snail. These live wild in the UK, on the chalklands or the southern downs, but they are protected by law because they are very rare in the UK. They are difficult to keep in captivity, so most Snail farms have Helix aspersa maxima. When you get Escargots in France they are often collected from the wild.

Photograph of a Roman Snail

First Post.

We have decided to grow some snails to eat. This is a blog about our, and our snails, journey from Eggs to the Table. 

In fact, our snails actually arrived as hatchlings not eggs, they were about a week old and only a millimetre or two across, we put them in a heated propogator, the sort that are sold in garden centres for growing seedlings. That was about a month ago and in the next week or so our largest snails should be ready to move into their adult enclosure. The two largest are about the size of a marble, but a lot of the others are still much smaller only 4-5mm across.