At the marché a couple of weeks ago, I bought what I thought was empty snail shells and distributed them in the pretty stone dishes on the patio for decoration and in the plants outside the backdoor. (Local cats think of plants as toilets so it is necessary to protect the dirt with rocks or other things).
Rick found what he thought was a cute one until he realised that there were crawling all over. I rushed to the patio to discover that those empty shells--weren't empty. They were home to little creatures.
We gathered them up and took them to the dry riverbed and sent them on their slow way. The next day when we checked, they had moved on, unless someone had discovered them and made a meal of them.
Yesterday
Rick was preparing the patio for a bbq that we were having. He spied one snail on the wall. He plucked it from the wall, despite the snail's valiant attempt to hang on.
I carried him/her (how do you know which gender a snail is?) to a more suitable habitat.
Rick doesn't appreciate snails even if the Aztec moon god Tecciztecatl bore a snail shell on his back as a symbol of rebirth. Maybe that last snail (or at least Rick hopes there are no more hiding in the rubber tree) was more than a symbol of rebirth.
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3 comments:
Aren't snails hermaphrodites? So it was a (s)he
Didn't know that. It's been a long time since biology.
One of those things that sticks in my dustbin like brain - but I did have to double check it with Wikipedia (which was silent on the subject, but gave me the link I needed!),
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