Class LH have been examining the habitat, lifestyle and parts of snails this week.
We created a micro-habitat using bark,
leaves, damp grass and cabbage leaves.
We spent a couple of days observing them in class and noticed that the cabbage
was being eaten but we never saw the snails eating it in class! From this, we concluded that they were
nocturnal.
On Wednesday, we investigated: “Do snails smell?” We placed
them in between fresh fruit and plastic fruit.
Two snails started off towards the plastic fruit but then continued on
and were hiding in a dark corner in the roof of a tank. The real fruit was eaten by the snails and so
we concluded that they used their feelers to find and sense the food.
Our next investigation was to find out how far the snails travelled. We safely placed a small mark on their shells, being very careful not to touch their soft foot. The children placed the snails in the quiet area. The next day we could only find one of them which had travelled about half a metre. We couldn’t find the others.
Today we found two more of them and one of them was next to a snail which didn't have a mark on it. We are keeping our beady eyes open for the others in the quiet area as they may reappear elsewhere. We talked about how they could be either camouflaged, may have found somewhere dark and damp to hide after the rain this week or have been used as part of the food chain and being eaten by a bird.
