Slipper Snail

Vocabulary Words

• Snail – Gastropod.
• Substrate – Underlying layer of material.
• Colonial – an association of animals that live together.
• Native Range – area where a plant or animal naturally occurs.
• Plankton – small and microscopic organisms floating in the sea.

Fun Facts

• Unlike other snails, slipper snails cannot move.  They attach to something (usually a rock or another slipper snail) and spend their entire life there.

• Start out as plankton and are not boys or girls until they attach to something.

• Once they attach to something they become a boy.

• Once another slipper shell attaches to them, that slipper shell becomes a boy and they become a girl.  This continues so that in their colony there are always boys and girls so they can reproduce.

• Slipper shells eat plankton, so may end up eating slipper shell babies (larvae).