Garden Snail (Cornu aspersum): Facts, Shell, Diet and Lifespan

What does a garden snail look like?

The shell is round and fairly thin, with four to five whorls, or turns, coiling around a low spire. It is usually brown or yellowish brown with darker chestnut bands that are broken into flecks and streaks, giving the “speckled” look that its old species name, aspersa, describes. The opening, called the aperture, is large and slanted. In adults its edge is thickened, white and turned slightly outward, a sign that the snail has stopped growing.

The soft body is grayish brown, covered in small wrinkles and kept moist by mucus. On the head are four tentacles that can be pulled inward like the finger of a glove. The upper pair is longer and carries simple eyes at the tips, which sense light and dark rather than sharp images. The lower pair is used for touch, smell and taste. The mouth lies beneath them.

On the right side of the body, where the soft collar of the mantle meets the shell, is a breathing hole called the pneumostome. It opens and closes as the snail breathes air through a simple lung. Unlike many sea snails, the garden snail has no hard trapdoor, or operculum, to close its shell.

How big are garden snails?

An adult garden snail has a shell 25–40 mm (1–1.6 in) across and 25–35 mm (1–1.4 in) high. When it crawls, the stretched-out body can be longer than the shell is wide. Adults of the usual wild form weigh about 7–15 g (0.25–0.5 oz).

A much larger form, known in French as gros gris, is raised on snail farms. Its adults weigh about 20–30 g (0.7–1.1 oz). Genetic studies suggest this farmed stock came originally from North Africa, but it belongs to the same species.

Habitat and range

The garden snail is native to the Mediterranean region, from northwest Africa and Iberia east to Asia Minor and Egypt, and along the Atlantic side of western Europe. It lives in open, sheltered places: scrub, hedges, grassland, rocky slopes, coastal dunes, parks, vineyards and gardens. By day it rests under leaves, stones, logs and walls, coming out at night and after rain.

People have carried it around for thousands of years, perhaps since the first farmers of the Neolithic. It was taken to South Africa as food by French Huguenot settlers in the 18th century and to California in the 1850s, again as food. Today it is established in much of North America, South America, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and it is still spreading in parts of central Europe.

What do garden snails eat?

Garden snails are mainly herbivores. They eat the leaves, stems and flowers of many plants, as well as fruit, vegetables and cereals, and they often prefer wilting or decaying plant material to fresh growth. They also eat fungi and algae and sometimes scavenge dead animal matter, such as crushed snails and worms.

Food is scraped up with the radula, a ribbon-like tongue covered in thousands of microscopic teeth, working against a hard jaw on the roof of the mouth. Worn teeth at the front are replaced constantly from behind. Learn more in do snails have teeth?

To build its shell, a garden snail needs a lot of calcium. It gets this from food, from licking or eating chalky soil and stones, and, as a newly hatched baby, from eating its own eggshell.

How do garden snails move?

A garden snail crawls on a single broad muscular foot. Waves of muscle contraction ripple forward along the sole, and the snail glides over a thin layer of mucus. This slime is unusual: it behaves like a glue when still, letting the snail cling to walls and the undersides of leaves, but turns runny under the moving waves of the foot, so the snail can slide forward. On dry surfaces a snail can lift parts of its sole in arches to save mucus.

Snails are famously slow. A popular estimate from 1974 put the garden snail’s top speed at about 1.3 cm (0.5 in) per second, but the fastest snails in racing competitions reach only about 2.4 mm per second, or roughly 8.6 m (28 ft) per hour. That earns them a place among the slowest animals.

When disturbed, a garden snail withdraws into its shell. If badly irritated or injured, it can produce a defensive froth of mucus that may put off small attackers such as ants.

Hibernation and estivation

Like other land snails, the garden snail loses water through its skin, so it avoids heat, wind and sun. In dry summer weather it becomes inactive, a state called estivation (also spelled aestivation). It pulls into its shell, often fixed to a wall, post or plant stem, and seals the opening with a thin, papery film of dried mucus called an epiphragm. It can stay like this for weeks or months, waking up when rain returns.

In winter it hibernates in the same way, usually in a sheltered spot such as a crevice, a pile of leaves or the base of a hedge, and often in groups. By changing the chemistry of its body fluids, it can avoid ice forming in its tissues and survive temperatures down to about -5 °C (23 °F). Garden snails have a strong homing instinct and often return to the same resting place again and again.

Reproduction and love darts

Garden snails are hermaphrodites: every adult has both male and female organs. They do not fertilize themselves, though. Two snails court each other for hours, circling, touching with their tentacles and nibbling one another, before mating and exchanging sperm. Read more in are snails male or female?

Before mating, each snail tries to stab its partner with a love dart, a sharp spike of calcium carbonate several millimeters long. The dart does not carry sperm. Instead, mucus on its surface contains a substance that changes the partner’s reproductive tract so that more of the dart-shooter’s sperm is stored rather than digested, improving its chances of fathering offspring. About a third of darts miss or fail to stick, and a new dart takes about a week to form.

About one to two weeks after mating, each snail digs a small hole in loose soil and lays a clutch of roughly 50–100 round, pearly-white eggs, each about 3–4.5 mm across. A snail may lay several clutches a year. The young hatch after about two to four weeks.

How do garden snails grow their shells?

A baby snail hatches with a tiny, thin, almost transparent shell, which forms the tip of the adult shell. As it grows, the mantle, the fleshy layer under the shell, adds new material to the rim of the opening, so the shell grows outward in an ever-widening spiral. The shell is mostly calcium carbonate, covered with a thin outer skin that carries the color pattern.

Garden snail shells almost always coil to the right. Left-coiled individuals are extremely rare, at an estimated one in tens of thousands. One left-coiled garden snail found in London, nicknamed Jeremy, became famous in 2016 when scientists appealed for another “lefty” to mate with it. Shell growth and repair are explained in how do snails grow their shells?

Lifespan, predators and threats

Young garden snails take from about 10 months to two years to become adults, depending on climate and food. In the wild, most live about two to three years, and many die young from drought, frost or predators. In captivity, protected from these dangers, they can live considerably longer. The details are in how long do snails live?

Garden snails are food for many animals. Song thrushes smash shells against favorite stones, called anvils, and other birds, hedgehogs, shrews, rodents, frogs, toads, lizards, slow worms, ground beetles and glowworm larvae also eat them. Some predatory snails attack them too. Garden snails also carry parasites, including various nematode worms.

Conservation status

The garden snail has not been assessed for the IUCN Red List as a global species, so its global status is Not Evaluated. The IUCN’s European assessment, carried out in 2024, lists it as Least Concern, with a stable population. It is one of the most common and adaptable land snails in the world and thrives in places changed by people.

Garden snails and people

The garden snail has a double reputation. Around the Mediterranean it is a traditional food: in France it is the petit gris of escargot dishes, and the Catalan city of Lleida holds a large annual snail festival. Raising snails for food is called heliciculture.

In regions where it was introduced, especially California and South Africa, it is a serious pest of citrus groves, vineyards, vegetables and garden plants, and many places have quarantine rules to stop snails arriving in plant shipments. Its mucus is also used as an ingredient in cosmetic skin creams.

Despite the damage it can do, the garden snail is valued as a teaching animal. Its slow movements, tentacles and shell make it one of the first wild animals that many children watch closely. For how it differs from its shell-less relatives, see slug vs snail.