Do snails have teeth on their tongue

Q: How many teeth do snails have on their tongue?

Snails have the most teeth of any animal A snails teeth are arranged in rows on its tongue. A garden snail has about 14,000 teeth while other species can have over 20,000.

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Rasp and shovel in one
Surprisingly strong
How many teeth do snails have on their tongue?
Do snails have a teeth?
Where do snails have teeth?
Can snails bite you?

A Roman snail chops up a lettuce leaf coated with gruel with its rasping tongue. (Image: University of Hamburg)

They also eat very hard food – snails seem to be able to “bite” surprisingly hard. Do these molluscs have something like teeth in their mouths? In a way, yes, and on the tongue: with her toothy radula cut, chop and shovel your food down your throat. The special thing about it: Although the individual teeth are rather soft, the tongue is surprisingly strong, as experiments have shown. The radula teeth therefore act on the subsurface with a pressure of 4700 bar – that is as much as with an industrial waterjet cutter.

Snails colonize almost all habitats on our planet – from the deep sea to deserts to high mountains. The secret of their success lies in their ability to pick up both soft and very hard food with their rasping tongue. The mouth tool consists of a chitin band, which is covered with thousands of tiny teeth in longitudinal and transverse rows.

Rasp and shovel in one

When a snail eats, it first pushes its radula forward out of its mouth and presses part of its teeth onto the food. Then she pulls her tongue back and rubs the food off the ground with her radula teeth. Like a small bucket wheel excavator, the toothed tongue then transports the feed into the mouth of the screw. There it is pressed against the rigid jaw, which, for example, tears leaves and other larger parts of plants. The interesting thing about it: The snail’s teeth are relatively soft – in a Roman snail they are about the hardness of wood. Nevertheless, the animals can easily eat even hard food with their radula.

How is that possible? To find out, Wencke Krings from the Center for Natural History at the University of Hamburg and her colleagues examined the functioning and the power of the radula of spotted garden snails (Cornu aspersum) in more detail. “We wanted to see what snails can actually do with their teeth,” explains Krings. During the experiments, they applied a feed paste made from flour and carrot juice to a transparent acrylic plate in which a tiny force sensor was embedded. “It was relatively difficult to develop the experimental set-up because we had to make sure that nothing else than the radula touched the sensor from the screw,” says Krings. A camera also recorded the movements of the radula from below.

Surprisingly strong

The camera recordings revealed: “When the snail eats, it tightens the radula like a band so that the teeth stick out a little and can be used for scratching,” reports Krings. Only the outer tips of the radula teeth touched the ground. “We counted the number of teeth on the radula and were able to see through video recordings that only about 15 percent of the tongue is actually used to scratch the food. That corresponds to almost 3300 of the total of around 22,000 teeth.

Research on the rasping tongue of land snails (Video: Universität Hamburg)

The values recorded by the force sensor were all the more surprising: Overall, the Radula exerted a force of around 107 millinewtons on the ground. As the researchers found, the strongest forces were generated during the rubbing process itself, the second highest during the retraction and chopping of the food with the radula and jaw. “We did not expect such a high level of force in this second phase,” report Krings and her team.

But it becomes even more fascinating when you consider the relatively small contact area of the screw tongue of only 227 square micrometers. Because then the result is an astonishingly high value for the pressure that the snail can exert: “Together with the measured force, this means that the individual tooth tips act on the food with a pressure of up to 4700 bar,” reports Krings . That is 470 times more than the pressure with which a standard espresso machine works and about as much as industrial waterjet cutters that work on metal and stone.

Source: University of Hamburg; Professional article: Royal Society Open Science, doi: /10.1098/rsos.190222

How many teeth do snails have on their tongue?

Snails have the most teeth of any animal A snail's teeth are arranged in rows on its tongue. A garden snail has about 14,000 teeth while other species can have over 20,000.

Do snails have a teeth?

Thousands of Microsopic Teeth! Snails and slugs eat with a jaw and a flexible band of thousands of microscopic teeth, called a radula. The radula scrapes up, or rasps, food particles and the jaw cuts off larger pieces of food, like a leaf, to be rasped by the radula.

Where do snails have teeth?

Snail teeth are located on their radula, which is similar to a tongue. Yes; snails do in fact have teeth.

Can snails bite you?

Yes, snails can bite you, but it does not feel more than a small scrape. In fact, you'll often not notice a snail biting you. A snail bite is not like being bitten by other insects and animals. A snail biting you feels only like a small scrape.