Watch world-1st footage of a giant snail oozing a pearly white egg out of its slimy neck folds

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
In a world first, scientists have filmed a rare carnivorous snail laying an egg from a "genital pore" in its neck.
The footage answers long-standing questions about how the mysterious mollusks — known as the Mount Augustus snail (Powelliphanta augusta) — reproduce.
"It's remarkable that in all the time we've spent caring for the snails, this is the first time we've seen one lay an egg," Lisa Flanagan, a New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC) ranger who captured the footage, said in a statement. "We caught the action when we were weighing the snail. We turned it over to be weighed and saw the egg just starting to emerge from the snail."
In the video, a single pearly white egg oozes out of the snail's slimy neck folds, from an opening known as a genital pore.
There are at least 20 species and 59 sub-species of Powelliphanta snails, and they are among the largest snails in the world, according to the DOC. Powelliphanta snails are nocturnal and rarely come out during the day, except when it is particularly rainy. Therefore, they are not often very rarely spotted by humans.
They are also among New Zealand's most threatened invertebrate species due to predation and habitat loss.
According to the DOC , P. augusta, only found on the Buller Plateau on New Zealand's West Coast, are threatened by extinction due to open-cast coal mining in their native range.
Because of their shrinking population and nocturnal behavior, very little is known about these creatures' life cycle and behavior. Therefore, wildlife officials have been studying a population in captivity for nearly 20 years.
"DOC has been managing this captive population in chilled containers in Hokitika since 2006, when work began to mine the majority of their habitat on the West Coast of the South Island," the DOC representatives said in a Facebook post. "Very little was known about the species before they were taken into captivity."
Like many snails, Powelliphanta are hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female reproductive organs. P. augusta are long-lived and slow to mature, only reaching sexual maturity at around 8 years old — which is very old for a snail. Mature snails usually lay around five eggs a year, which can take more than a year to hatch.
"Some of our captive snails are between 25 and 30 years old — in this they're polar opposites to the pest garden snail we introduced to New Zealand which is like a weed, with thousands of offspring each year and a short life," Kath Walker, DOC senior science advisor, said in the statement.
While the snails' hard shells help to protect them from predation and harsh conditions, they also make it difficult to get sperm from one snail into another. "Powelliphanta have solved this by having an opening (a genital pore) on the right side of their body just below their head so that the snail only needs to peek out of its shell to do the business," Walker said.
"It extends its penis out of this pore and into its mate's pore, and its mate does the same, simultaneously exchanging sperm, which they can store until they each fertilise the sperm they've received to create eggs," Walker said.
She added that, because they have both male and female reproductive organs, the snails can also self-fertilize.
RELATED STORIES
—The brain-hijacking parasite that creates disco zombie snails
—9 surprising facts about David Attenborough on his 99th birthday
—8 animals that have virgin births
Laying eggs through a genital pore is common among snail species, although some species, such as Littorina saxatilis in the U.K., give birth to live young. But Powelliphanta species are unusual because they only lay one egg at a time, rather than the big eggy clusters produced by many other more common snail species, according to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
To save these exotic snails, the DOC has established new populations in the wild by introducing them into new and rehabilitated habitats. However, they will continue to manage populations in captivity too until they are confident that the species is surviving well in the wild.
"The captive management of Powelliphanta augusta has not only saved the species from extinction, but it's allowed us to learn more about the lives of these incredible creatures found nowhere else in the world," according to the statement.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Forbes

a day ago

• Forbes

How Life Survived Snowball Earth

Artist's impression of "Snowball Earth." The Snowball Earth hypothesis suggests that, hundreds of ... More millions of years ago, the Earth's surface may have frozen solid as a result of severe climate change. During the Cryogenian period about 700 to 635 million years ago, Earth experienced a super ice age, one that froze the entire planet from the poles to the equator. Scientist have long wondered how life survived this 'Snowball Earth.' Most of the surface was covered by ice, so there was no to little sunlight reaching the oceans, and with no weathering happening on the frozen-solid continents, no nutrients were washed into the sea. Maybe hot springs deep beneath the ice provided a last viable spot where life persisted until the ice receded. In a new study, researchers at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Waikato in New Zealand, propose an alternative hypothesis. 'We're interested in understanding the foundations of complex life on Earth. We see evidence for eukaryotes before and after the Cryogenian in the fossil record, but we largely lack direct evidence of where they may have lived during,' says lead author Fatima Husain, a graduate student in MIT. 'The great part of this mystery is, we know life survived. We're just trying to understand how and where.' The scientists found that lifeforms could have survived the global freeze by living in watery oases on the surface. Similar environmental conditions still exist today in cryoconite holes. Dark-colored dust and debris transported by glaciers to the surface absorb sunlight, heating up and melting into the ice forming small pockets and holes. At temperatures hovering around 0 degrees Celsius, the resulting meltwater ponds could have served as habitable environments for early life. Cryoconite hole on a glacier The researchers analyzed samples from a variety of cryoconite holes and meltwater ponds located on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in an area that was first described by members of Robert Falcon Scott's 1903 expedition as 'dirty ice.' They discovered clear signatures of life in every pond. Even more surprising, the communities varied from pond to pond, revealing a high diversity of life forms. There were cyanobacteria, prokaryotic, single-celled photosynthetic organisms that lack a cell nucleus or other organelles. The oldest cyanobacteria-like fossils appear on Earth over 3 billion years ago. While these ancient microbes are known to survive within some of the the harshest environments on Earth, the researchers wanted to know whether eukaryotes — complex organisms that evolved a cell nucleus and other membrane bound organelles — could also weather similarly challenging circumstances. Chemical analysis showed the presence of various molecules clearly associated with eukaryotic life. The team found that salinity plays a key role in the kind of life a pond can host: Ponds that were more brackish or salty had more similar communities, which differed from those in ponds with fresher waters. 'No two ponds were alike,' Husain explains. 'There are repeating casts of characters, but they're present in different abundances. And we found diverse assemblages of eukaryotes from all the major groups in all the ponds studied. These eukaryotes are the descendants of the eukaryotes that survived the Snowball Earth. This really highlights that meltwater ponds during Snowball Earth could have served as above-ice oases that nurtured the eukaryotic life that enabled the diversification and proliferation of complex life — including us — later on.' Additional material and interviews provided by MIT News.

Yahoo

2 days ago

• Yahoo

New Zealand PM Luxon meets China's Xi Jinping

(Reuters) -New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said on Friday he and China's President Xi Jinping discussed the role of business, education and science to help boost relations between the two countries. "I raised the importance to New Zealand of the international rules-based system, as well as the key role that China can play in helping to resolve global challenges," Luxon said in a statement after meeting Xi Jinping in Beijing.

Bloomberg

2 days ago

• Bloomberg

Scientists Stumble Upon Way to Reduce Cow Dung Methane Emissions

Twice a day at milking parlors all over New Zealand, the world's biggest dairy exporter, sheds are hosed down to wash away cow dung into large manmade ponds. In an attempt to recycle the water in the lagoons, two local scientists — Keith Cameron and Hong Di — began testing the addition of polyferric sulfate, a chemical that's been widely used in wastewater treatment to separate liquids from solids. The process worked, but that didn't prove to be their most interesting finding.