Common Garden Snail

• It is a simultaneous hermaphrodite but cross-fertilising: each individual has both sets of reproductive organs and still needs another snail in order to breed.
• In drought it withdraws into its shell and seals the opening with a plug of hardened mucus called an epiphragm.
• It is the mainstay of Mediterranean snail farming, but it also appears on the official pest lists of Canada and the United States.
• It is the garden snail everyone knows, and also the most widely eaten edible snail in Spain: most of the country's snail tapas are of this species.
• It is a hermaphrodite, and its courtship includes a remarkable trait: before copulating, each individual shoots a calcareous dart into the other, the so-called love dart, coated in a secretion that raises the odds that its sperm will be the one to fertilise the eggs. It is a form of sperm competition.
• It seals its shell with a partition of hardened mucus, the epiphragm, to pass the winter or dry spells in dormancy, sometimes for months.
• Its slime is exploited commercially in cosmetics for its content of allantoin, collagen and glycolic acid.
• It has spread around the world with the plant trade and with farming for consumption, and in California, Australia and South Africa it behaves as an agricultural pest.
• Its scientific name has changed: for decades it was Helix aspersa.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - external calcareous shell coiled in a spiral (gastropod mollusc)

Habitat & environment

Gardens, allotments, woodland, grassland and dunes of the Mediterranean basin and western Europe. It is an anthropophilic species, abundant around houses and in farmed areas

Size at birth

The eggs are spherical and pearly white, about 3-4 mm across

Sexual maturity

Between the first and the second year of life

Gestation / incubation

10-25 days of incubation underground

Litter / clutch size

50-120 eggs per clutch, buried 3 or 4 cm deep, with up to six clutches a year

Lifespan in captivity

Individuals reaching 15 years under controlled conditions have been documented

Sources consulted: Museo de La Plata (ficha Cornu aspersum, 2024); CONABIO 2017, Evaluación rápida de invasividad; Guiller y Madec 2010; Asturnatura; Wikipedia (Cornu aspersum)

Best time: All year round, though it is seen mainly after rain and at nightfall; in dry summers and cold winters it goes dormant