Morphology of a snail
The Rocky Intertidal Experiment
Morphology
The snail is a member of the phylum Mollusca. The snail’s general features include a soft body with a hard calcium carbonate shell. In addition, the body is coated by a thin tissue called the mantle which secretes the shell (Castro and Huber, 2003). The snail has an unsegmented body with bilateral symmetry, and a ventral muscular foot that provides locomotion (Castro and Huber, 2003). In addition, “periwinkles feed with a tongue like radula, but modified for use as a rake or file” (Bertness, 1999). They scrape algae from the substrate into their mouths where it is surrounded by mucus and pulled into their digestive system (Bertness, 1999). The digestive system includes the digestive glad, intestine, and stomach (Castro and Huber, 2003).
 |
||
| Information for educational purposes only. All images copyrighted by Clark University© 2004 |