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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).
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