any member of more than 65,000 animal species belonging to the class Gastropoda, the largest group in the phylum Mollusca. The class is made up of the snails, which have a shell into which the animal can generally withdraw, and the slugs—snails whose shells have been reduced to an internal fragment or completely lost in the course of evolution.
Gastropods are among the few groups of animals to have become successful in all three major habitats: the ocean, fresh waters, and land. A few gastropod types (such as conch, abalone, limpets, and whelks) are used as food, and several different species may be used in the preparation of escargot. Very few gastropod species transmit animal diseases; however, the flukes that cause human schistosomiasis use gastropods as intermediate hosts. The shells of some species are used as ornaments or in making jewelry. Some gastropods are scavengers, feeding on dead plant or animal matter; others are predators; some are herbivores, feeding on algae or plant material; and a few species are external or internal parasites of other invertebrates.
Some adult marine snails (Homalogyra) and forest-litter snails (Stenopylis, Punctum) are less than one millimetre (0.04 inch) in diameter. At the other extreme, the largest land snail, the African Achatina achatina, forms a shell that is almost 20 centimetres (eight inches) long. The largest freshwater snails, Pomacea from South America, reach nearly 10 centimetres in diameter, and the largest marine snail, the Australian Syrinx aruanus, occasionally grows to more than 0.6 metre (two feet). The longest snail probably is Parenteroxenos doglieli, which lives as a parasite in the body cavity of a sea cucumber: it grows to be almost 130 centimetres (50 inches) in length, although it is only 0.5 centimetre (0.2 inch) in diameter. Most snails are much smaller; probably 90 percent of all adult snails are less than one inch in maximum dimension.
Snails show a tremendous variety of shapes, based primarily upon the logarithmic spiral. They can be coiled flatly in one plane, as in Planorbis; become globose with the whorls increasing rapidly in size, as in Pomacea; have the whorls become elongate and rapidly larger, as in Conus and Scaphella; have a few flatly coiled whorls that massively increase in width, as in Haliotis; become elongated and spike-shaped, as in Turritella; or be humped to form a limpet shape, as in Fissurella. Often a number of such shell shapes can be found among species within a single family, but such marine families as the Terebridae, Conidae, and Cypraeidae are conservative in shape. Shells of different species vary markedly in thickness, and those of many species bear conspicuous spines and ridges, probably as an evolutionary adaptation to predation.
Traditionally, the three main gastropod groups are the prosobranchs (subclass Prosobranchia), the opisthobranchs (subclass Opisthobranchia), and the pulmonates (subclass Pulmonata); however, many authorities classify the pulmonates as a subgroup within subclass Opisthobranchia. The prosobranchs generally secrete a substantial shell into which the animal can withdraw. The operculum, an often calcified disk situated on the rear part of the foot, fills the shell aperture when the snail is inside the shell, protecting the animal against predation and desiccation. Opisthobranchs are marine species that often have a reduced or absent shell and very colourful bodies. The pulmonates are snails and slugs that lack an operculum but show complex and highly varied body structures. They have a “lung” or pulmonary cavity that serves also as a water reservoir. Gastropods have a fossil record that extends back over 500 million years.
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