I’m talking the shells on a hermit crabs back and shells of that nature. I know how clam shells are formed but conch snails and other sea snails have huge shells, how are they formed?
In: Earth Science
Seashells are formed much like plants grow. Just like a plant is like a little factory that turns oxygen, carbon, and trace minerals from the ground into a physical form (be it a blade of grass or a cypress tree), mollusks do the same but with the shell.
They take in minerals and compounds from the marine environment and then excrete them from their bodies, building the layers of the shell like a little 3D printer. When the mollusk dies, the shell (which is made primarily out of calcium and other minerals) ends up washed up on the shore (or turned into a house by some other sea creature).
Here’s a fun bonus fact: in acidic water, shells are slowly dissolved by the water (giving up tiny bits of their mineral structure to the water day by day over long periods of time). But in some bodies of water the water is basic enough that it can’t eat away at the shell. The shells there just pile up. There are multiple species of cichlid fish in Lake Tanganyika in Africa that live in shells because the shells don’t dissolve and pile up on the bottom of the lake in giant drifts that are sometimes a dozen feet deep.
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