Many times I’ve seen snails appear in the garden, seemingly out of nowhere, during rain. What I don’t understand is where they come from – snails don’t move very fast, so the fact that they’re suddenly there – are they there the whole time, but only come out when it rains? If not, why are they drawn to this garden – surely it’s raining everywhere else as well. What about the rain causes them to appear? And how do they disappear again afterwards? You never see them moving in or out, like you can’t see them turned away and leaving at the end, or disappearing into whatever hole they came from. How do they appear so suddenly when they move so slowly? I just want someone to give me a simple explanation pls
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Snails crawl around on a mucous-covered foot and have soft, wet skin that loses water quickly. They dry out pretty easily. Because of this they prefer to be out and about when it’s wet. When it is dry, they can withdraw inside their shells, plug the opening, and basically seal themselves into a nice, watertight little package to wait out the next rainy day.
So when it’s dry, the snails crawl down and hide themselves under rocks and in leaf litter and places like that down on the ground. They are hard to find, but if you dig around enough under things and in sheltered, damp areas, you may come across some. You may think they are dead at first, since they just look like shells with the open end closed up with a plug of gunk. But when it rains, they crawl out and start climbing all over everything. You don’t really see them coming or going because they aren’t traveling far, maybe just a few feet.
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