This Giant Snail Lays Eggs Out of Its Neck… Yes, Seriously

If you idea human delivery used to be critically twisted, get a load of the Mount Augustus snail from New Zealand. This large carnivorous gastropod pushes 5-millimeter-wide eggs out of a pore slightly below its head.

The pain-in-the-neck type of replica used to be not too long ago stuck on digicam by way of Lisa Flanagan, a ranger at NZ’s Department of Conservation (DOC), who has been taking good care of a captive inhabitants of those snails (Powelliphanta augusta) since 2006.

“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,” says Flanagan.

“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.”

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Powelliphanta are a number of the largest snails in the world, and they comb through NZ’s forest and grasslands slurping up earthworms like spaghetti.

P. augusta is among the extra well-known species (just about 10 centimeters in duration), and it used to be simplest found out by way of the DOC in 2005, when many of the snail’s habitat used to be matter to mining. The wild inhabitants is now confined to only a few presented websites, the place the snail hasn’t lived traditionally, however a captive colony exists of kind of 2,000 folks as a genetic insurance plans.

These are one of the most longest-living snails on this planet – one of the most captive snails below Flanagan’s care are between 25 and 30 years previous.

“I just love watching their progress each month, weighing them, how their shells develop, and all the interesting things they do,” says Flanagan.

While they typically lay round 5 eggs according to 12 months, ranging from in regards to the age of 8, that is the primary time scientists in New Zealand have noticed the egg-laying in motion.

The species is a hermaphrodite, that means each and every particular person has female and male genitalia.

To mate, each and every snail pushes out a penis from its neck pore and pokes it into the pore of the opposite snail. Both folks trade sperm after which retailer it for later fertilization.

It is from this similar neck pore {that a} fertilized egg later emerges.

Talk about evolutionary potency.