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.<\/p>\n
Herbivorous seaslugs have teeth shaped into serrated triangles or sharp blades to pierce the tough cell walls of particular\u00a0seaweeds and suck out the sap \u2013 the marine equivalent of aphids.<\/p>\n
Carnivorous slugs and snails have terrifying fangs that lock in place like flick knives, folding safely away when not in use.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s skin before drinking their blood.<\/p>\n
Slugs generally have up to\u00a0<\/strong>27,000 teeth<\/p>\n Snails can have up to 20,000 teeth, but the garden snail has\u00a0just<\/em><\/strong>\u00a014,000 teeth<\/p>\n The most sophisticated snail teet belongs to cone snails one of the\u00a0world’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.<\/p>\n Worst of all, the snails spit out their teeth like poison darts. Their usual targets \u2013 worms, fish and other molluscs \u2013 are instantly paralysed before being swallowed whole and slowly digested.<\/p>\nHow many teeth does a snail have?<\/h2>\n
Most deadly snail teeth<\/h2>\n