As we walked in the water we could feel slime at times on the bottom and saw many of these bubble snails all over. We guessed Spring is on its way and it's mating season.
When you put the bubble snail in a container, it oozes slime as you can just above the rear of this snail - the slime with bubbles trapped in it. Why does this snail slime so much?
We came back in early June and found what we think are its eggs floating along the edges of the water looking like debris more than eggs, until you look closely. It's beautifully striped.
We brought a piece home and took a look under the microscope.
There stripes are in fact rows, upon rows, upon rows of tiny eggs!
Here you can see how they are very busy eggs. Why do they spin so much?
We saw many little bubble snails everywhere this time.
Here are some other curious snail eggs we found along with a navanax. The collar type structure is a moon snail's egg collar and it has some other type of eggs pasted onto it.
And here's a ziploc bag that the kids found in the water with even more of the unidentified eggs on it. The snail was glad to have something sturdy to lay its eggs on.
How does a creature so slimy create such remarkable egg structures?
No comments:
Post a Comment