“Their teeth are barbed and hollow, and primed with a toxic cocktail strong enough to kill a human. Worst of all they spit out their teeth like poison darts”

Did you know most snails and slugs have teeth, thousands of them? Their teeth come in a huge variety of shapes and arrangements, suiting them to specific diets and allowing many species to evolve and co-exist.

Why do slugs and snails need teeth?

Herbivorous seaslugs have teeth shaped into serrated triangles or sharp blades to pierce the tough cell walls of particular seaweeds and suck out the sap – the marine equivalent of aphids.

Carnivorous slugs and snails have terrifying fangs that lock in place like flick knives, folding safely away when not in use.

Some use their teeth to drill into other shells and slurp out the contents (a seashell with a neat circle punched into it will have been the victim of a mollusc attack), while nutmeg snails creep up on sleeping stingrays and use a tooth on the end of a long proboscis to slit their quarry’s skin before drinking their blood.

How many teeth do slugs have?

Slugs generally have up to 27,000 teeth

How many teeth does a snail have?

Snails can have up to 20,000 teeth, but the garden snail has just 14,000 teeth

Most deadly snail teeth

The most sophisticated snail teet belongs to cone snails one of the world’s deadliest sea animals. Their teeth are barbed and hollow, and primed with a toxic cocktail strong enough to kill a human, though they would only attack one in self-defence.

Worst of all, the snails spit out their teeth like poison darts. Their usual targets – worms, fish and other molluscs – are instantly paralysed before being swallowed whole and slowly digested.

This article by Dr Helen Scales was first published by Discover Wildlife on 4 August 2026. 

What You Can Do

Help to save wildlife by donating as little as $5 – It only takes a minute.