Zombie Snails

Your blog material is very interesting.-I'm not living the scientific life but always had an interest in such things.-Perhaps George A. Romero can use this material for his next movie.

Heard of Toxoplasma gondii? It a parasite that affects the behavior of humans... and a large portion of the population is currently infected.

To me the ability of some parasites to alter the behavior of their hosts in ways that facilitate dispersal to other hosts has always been among the coolest things in biology. If you agree with me I highly recommend Carl Zimmer's book Parasite Rex.

Having been struggling with collecting, euthanizing, and identifying snails for the past three weeks, I am now of the opinion that uninfected snails are already undead, possibly already zombies.

Go ahead, try to euthanize a snail. Sure, you can crush them and smear their brains, and they die rather quickly. But if you want to preserve the shell (very important for species identification) and work with the soft tissue (I need cell nuclei) you need some other method. Most of the usual lab chemicals suitable for rapid killing of, for example, insects take a very long time to work on snails. Those snails with an operculum to hide behind inside their shells can survive immersion in 70% Ethanol for a day or two, and crawl around when freed from the booze. For comparison, even very tough, heavily armoured large beetles will succumb to 70% EtOH in about 30 seconds.

My hypothesis is that snails are not really alive, most of the time. Their metabolisms are so slow they don't actually interact with their environment except at rare intervals.

Also, cool video. The snail in the video looks very similar to one I am currently struggling to identify.