Interactions
Just like every other organism in the world,
snails interact and are part of a community in a unique way. Marsh Liptooth shares its environment with various plants and animals,
both large and small.
Above pictured is a snail showing off
its ability to adapt to any situation in
order to survive, and in this case,
survival is dependent on its ability
to hang upside down on a leaf.
Being so small, a snail has to be weary of being eaten by a large
r predator. A snail's main predators are birds, frogs, snakes, and even ducks (Snail-world.com). As mentioned in our nutrition section, most
snails are herbivores, and there are even some that can be carnivorous (Hickman,
et al., 2009).
Snails are also known to be
intermediate hosts for various parasites (Hickman,
et al., 2009). For a parasite, a snail is a very important part of
its life cycle because the snail provides an environment for the larva
of various parasites to go through the different stages of their life
cycle (Hickman, et al., 2009).
Snails, like
all other organisms, have their own specific place to fit into the ever
complex food web that makes our world funciton. First of all, a
food web consists of various levels, starting with producers (Hickman,
et al., 2009). Producers, who are autotrophs, produce energy
for themselves by converting light energy into chemical energy
(Hickman, et al., 2009). The next level
in the food web is consumers, and they can range from being primary,
secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary consumers
(Hickman, et al., 2009). Most snails
fit into the food web as primary consumers since they are herbivores,
which means they only consume plants. While other snails can be
considered secondary consumers because they consume other animals, but
they themselves are still prey to larger predators
(Hickman, et al., 2009).
To put this more into
perspective, we, as humans, would be considered a quaternary consumer
because we are the highest of predators
(Hickman, et al., 2009). However,
humans are also omnivorous, so we can also be named a primary consumer
too. We can even
go as far as being named a predator to snails because many people eat
the popular dish escargot, which
is really just stuffed snails. Since we are at the top of the
food chain, we can be classified as a predator to everything lower than
us on the food web, which includes snails.
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