Wade out into the waters of western and northern Australia and, if you’re lucky, you might just stumble across the biggest snail in the world. The Australian trumpet doesn’t live on land but has endured to become a voracious marine predator that hunts on the sea floor, comparable in size to a Border Collie.
Recent research showed how the world of mollusks seems to have kicked off with a small flat slug covered in spiky armor. Since then, the animal group has really taken that body plan and run, creating magnificent creatures big and small, from the teeny micro-mollusk Angustopila dominikae that can fit in the eye of a needle 10-fold, to the biggest snail in the world: the Australian trumpet.
The biggest snail in the world
The Australian trumpet, Syrinx aruanus, is the biggest snail in the world and the largest living shelled gastropod on the planet. With a vibrant yellow foot, it drags around a massive shell that can be up to 91 centimeters (2.95 feet) long. At a whopping 18 kilograms (40 pounds), picking one of these babies up would feel like lifting a tire.
Field observations and fecal analyses from the Australian trumpet have revealed it enjoys a diet of large polychaete worms like Polyodontes, Loimia, and Diopatra. The munching snails were observed on the muddy sand flats of Withnell Bay in Western Australia in 2000, and once spotted, they were accosted.
Giant shell but make it fashun.
“By easing the animals gently away from the sediment it was seen that some individuals had proboscides inserted into large polychaete tubes, other individuals were located above large empty polychaete tubes and in other cases the Syrinx were resting in depressions in the sediment,” wrote the study authors. “A tube length of 57 cm [22 inches] was the maximum we were able to extract.”
“The possession of a long extensible proboscis is essential to exploit these large worms which can retreat a long way back into the tubes. Some of the Syrinx observed in the field had narrow proboscides extended for at least 250mm [10 inches] into the worm tubes.”
A massive snail eating a half-a-meter worm? Giants slime among us.
Why trumpet?
While we don’t recommend blowing into one of these snails living, their empty shells are a popular collector’s item that’s been used in the past to carry water and – you guessed it – as a trumpet.
From the biggest snail in the world to a curious musical instrument, we humans really are creative.
