Sea snail

Than sea snails those families and species of snails are known that live in the sea. The salty water, they have a partially different from freshwater and terrestrial snails biochemistry.

Since the class of the worm comes out of the sea, sea snails form a closed systematic group: The sea snails are the most primitive snails, but also far away developed and highly specialized groups, and branches living taxa in freshwater and on land at various points of the family tree from.

Some forms can also outwardly look like shells - such as the abalone. These types have a decreased expression of the otherwise discernible in snails right-left symmetry.

The housing form, starting from the edge of the mantle and often have bright colors and sometimes inside nacreous luster. The coloring is generally little or no function because it is hardly noticeable below 10-20 meters water depth. Here, the red light is already largely filtered out of the solar radiation, so that blue components predominate in the light. In addition, the colors of the shells are usually caused by the landfilling of waste products of protein metabolism.

Some snails are also part of the zooplankton, Glaucus atlanticus or about the predatory Pterotracheidae.

The housing of marine snails serve in various cultures of the production of screws trumpets. Superstition maintained at a snail's house, the sound of the sea was caught, which you can take as preserved holiday memories to take home - Due to the special acoustic properties is also - mostly jokingly.

Well-known examples of sea snails

Many of the marine snails are known as " Seafood " popular and partly culinary delicacies, which the stock of some species already endangered.

In addition to the oe abalone ( abalone ), which are very popular for Asian cuisine, this concerns for example the purple snails - but because of the production of the popular since ancient times purple.

Among the many, even the smaller species - which are also found in the temperate zone and, further north, in addition to warm seas, other animal species are much known.

Website

• Seawater lexicon, nudibranchs
• Seawater lexicon, snails

• Malacology