""The snails themselves can get huge, like grapefruit sized," said Charlotte Seid, manager of the Benthic Invertebrate Collection at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. "They have a very thick round shell. They are distinctive and look like a full moon. The rest of the animal is fleshy...has a huge muscular foot and can propel itself to glide along the sea floor.""
""They eat their prey very slowly and very creatively," Seid said. "Moon snails have a tongue that is raspy like a cat tongue. They don't have fangs or anything scary, but it is a slow way to drill a hole into another shelled creature. They are very patient. They will lick and lick and lick until it makes a hole in the shell,""
Moon snails in La Jolla have thick, round shells that resemble a full moon and can reach grapefruit size. They produce egg cases on the seafloor that look like broken pottery. The animal is fleshy with a large muscular foot that enables it to glide along the sea floor. A specialized front structure pushes sand aside and detects chemical cues while hunting. Moon snails prey on clams and other snails by rasping and drilling holes with a cat-tongue-like radula and then extracting the animal. They bury in sand to hide, exposing only tentacles with small black tips to sense predators, and are themselves prey for other snails and possibly rays and octopuses.
Read at The Mercury News
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