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Quote from the Related Link: "What do snails eat? In their natural habitat, land snails eat mushrooms, fruit, leaves and any other kind of vegetation they can find. Mostly, snails eat living plants, but also eat decaying ones. Other forms of food include plant bark, flowers and algae. In order to get a nutritional supply of calcium for their shells, snail food includes limestone and they also eat chalk from rocks. Snails have even been known to eat damp paper and cardboard! So, in answer to the question what do snails eat, as we have seen the answer is mushrooms, fruit, leaves, flowers, bark, algae, limestone, chalk, damp paper and cardboard." Some snails are carnivores, eating other snails as preys.

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15y ago
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10y ago

If you are talking about land snails and slugs (slugs are really just snails that do not grow shells) then practically all of them feed by rasping their food. In a snail's mouth along the bottom, more or less like a tongue, they have a strip of flesh covered with rows of pointed teeth. It is rather like a fleshy file and the scientific name is "radula ", which is Latin for "little file". When they "lick" their food the teeth on the radula rasp off little bits of food that the snail can swallow. Sometimes if the food is hard, like a pip of a date, one actually can hear the rasping.

As for the kind of food that a snail can eat, it depends on the kind of snail. For example some kinds of snails are predators, hunters that chase other snails and eat them alive. Many kinds of snails eat plants, which is why gardeners hate them and in countries where the predatory snails live, gardeners like them because they kill the plant eating snails. Most kinds of snails, including most of the kinds that eat plants, will also eat any dead food material that they find; snails move so slowly that they cannot afford to pass by anything eatable that they happen to find. So you will often see slugs and snails eating squashed worms or other snails that they happen to have found. They will also then eat dead leaves and other garbage, which can be useful in recycling food material in nature. In fact some kinds of such snails are useful food for humans, who cannot eat dead leaves, but can eat snails that have eaten the dead leaves. In West Africa for example farmers sometimes will grow the giant African snail on dead leaves from their banana trees or Cacao trees. They either can sell the snails in local markets, or eat them themselves.

There also are many kinds of snails that live in water, either fresh water or seawater. Most of them, like land snails, have a radula and also like land snails, some eat waste materials or plants and others (like whelks for example) are predators and eat either other snails or other animals entirely. Some of them, like the cone shells, have deadly poisonous stings (often called darts) with which they killed passing fishes that they then swallow. The darts are so dangerous that some kinds of cone shells can kill humans that pick them up to see their beautiful shells.

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14y ago

How often should I feed my pet land snails

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Anonymous

Lvl 1
3y ago
every day

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11y ago

i don t know

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13y ago

scraping

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11y ago

scraping

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12y ago

Eaglem

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Anonymous

Lvl 1
3y ago

snails need a variety of food including lettuce tomato cucumber leafs and in general they are really really good pets

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Anonymous

Lvl 1
3y ago
wow

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Q: What is the diet of snails?
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