I've been going to Tot Lot for a few weeks. Sometimes I go in the morning. Sometimes I go in the afternoon. I stay for several hours and with me, I bring tripods, ipods, macro lenses, and several of the nine snails who've been living in a terrarium in my room for the past month. At Tot Lot, there are felt markers, paper, clipboards, a light-up table, caring adults, young people (ages 15 months - 5 years old), kindness, and time.
In this free, humane context filled with blocks, a sandbox, and art supplies young people explore and construct worlds — they construct rocket ships, animal battles, lego iphones, and families made of people and baby dolls. Tot lot exist at the precipice of the imaginary and the material. It's in this space, with these people, that I investigate snails. Working in this context to observe and document snails has helped me think a lot more deeply about snails and what it means to get to know and think how animals work. In an attempt to capture some of my experience, I've started to collect and curate artifacts, which I find particularly exciting.
Friday, October 6th, 2017
It was my first day. The friends — as the young people are called — at Tot Lot had been told I was coming. When I walked in the door in the afternoon, they looked up at me, silently. I said hello and they answered with silent gazes. When I went to the back table to set up, some followed, including a little girl named Maddie.
Maddie is 3. She has brown, curley hair. She was very friendly and asked me a lot of questions. When I took out some of the snails, she immediately identified one, pointing at it with her index finger while declaring, "It's a bumble bee snail! It's a bumble bee snail!"
I had no idea about bumble bee snails. I don't think of bumble bees and snails in the same category. A snail is wet, a bumble bee dry. A bumble-bee flies, a snail slimes and glides. Yet, to my surprise, all the small people nodded in agreement. They echoed Maddie, "It's a bumble bee snail!"
The snail they were pointing to is my favorite snail. Before it's stay in the terrarium, it lived in a patch of soil next to some asphalt near sprout. The patch of soil it occupied was covred with litter: a piece of an old tarp, the plastic packaging from chips and candy. The soil it lived in smelled like smokey dewey, rotting wood mixed with cat pee. Despite being far from pristine, this little plot of dirt felt wild. I used to like exploring this area to find it's inhabitant, the bumble bee snail.
It wasn't always easy to find the bumble bee snail. It's area was covered with criss-crossed branches of young catalpa trees and trees of heaven. Shockingly, the catalpa leaves shading this tiny urban jungle were the size of elephant ears! And despite being in Massachusetts, many of the plant species on this plot were from Asia. It somehow felt like a faraway place, even though it was in a small parking lot.
In this area, I had seen the bumble bee snail every so often for years — during a summer barbecue in 2015, and in August of 2017. The bumble bee snail was distinct: larger than a quarter, and golden yellow with a black stripe. It's shell was so big, it leaned off of it's body.
After going in the brushes a few times, I new exactly where to look for for the bumble bee snail. I noticed that during the day, it was always tucked in the same place, under a piece of old tarp. It was moist under there. I think this was it's sleeping spot because when I came across it, it was always tucked into it's shell. I later learned that grove snails are nocturnal, and this fit with my observations.
Grove snails, Cepaea nemoralis are're common in Europe. After some googling this summer, I discovered that their lifespan is seven years and they don't become reproductively active until around 3 years old. They're shells come in different colors (yellow, rose, brown) and with different arrangements of stripnes, the genetics of which has been intensely studied. I also found that, like the bumble bee snail, many grove snails have a distinct, brown lip on the edge of their shell. This is a distinguishing feature of adults of the species that can signify that the snail is of reproductive age, older than 3!
At Tot Lot, on that first day, almost everyone was excited about holding the snails. At one point, Maddie asked to hold the bumble bee snail. I put it on her hand. She was quite calm…until she wasn't and began flapping her hand to get the snail off. It went flying and fell onto the floor with a thud! Thank goodness, everyone was fine.
It's been almost two weeks since that day and I've gone to Tot Lot basically every day. And even amongst the two year olds, everyone asks for the bumble bee snail. A little girl who's not super verbal, ran up to me asking if I brought the bumble bee snail. When people approach the table with the snails, one of the first things they do is identify and point to the bumble bee snail out of the other snails gliding around. "That's the bumble bee snail!" they'll say.
So what is a bumble bee snail? So far, I've learned that Maddie branded the snail with it's bumble bee status in response to it's yellow color and, more relevantly, it's black stripe. She doesn't think it's actually a bumble bee, although when I asked if she thinks it stings, she said no… but there seemed to be some doubt in her voice. She seemed to be a bit more fond and scared of it, since it's not just a regular snail snail, and that's part of why she shook it off her hand the first time she held it. I asked Maddie if she thought it flies. Maddie said she didn't think so and another "friend" named Zoe, who's 4, insistantly stated, "Nooo! If it flew, it would have flown from the air to the table when Maddie dropped it that day!"
Wednesday, October 11th, 2107
We discovered that when you put snails (and a rogue caterpillar who somehow wound up in our terrarium) on a light table, you can see their insides! Here is some of what we saw!
Friday, October 13th, 2107
Rohan and I sat observing snails for quite some time. He wasn’t too keen on holding them but did want to photograph them with a macro lens, so we did that. At some point, Rohan announced that he "just realized something!" I asked to hear about it. “Snails carry their shells!” he said, wrinkling his forehead, lifting his eyebrows, and widening his eyes with enthusiasm.
I was touched by Rohan's realization because although it might seem quite obvious that a snail carries it's shell, it is quite amazing that their body has two very different parts, a soft part on the bottom and a hard one on top. These parts can seem so different that the shell starts to seem separate all together — like a backpack! And if you imagine the snail as a being that carries a HUGE back-pack all the time — a back pack so huge that your body can fit inside it — that is a wild concept!
However, I wonder if a shell is less of a back-pack, less of a home, and more of a body part. It's a structure that houses many of their organs, even ones — their foot, their eyes — that can come out. Functionally, like feathers, fur, or exoskeletons, it offers protection from the elements. But the shell of a snail looks and feels different than that of a clam or than the exoskeleton of an insect, because shells are huge, circular, globular entities that sit at the vertical apex of a snail, when a snail's eyes and foot are out of the shell, the shell feels quite unintegrated from the the "actual" snail — the thing with the eyes that's lugging it around!
But a shell holds a snails lung, kidney, stomach, and heart. The snail does not just merely possess the shell. In many ways, the shell is the snail in the ways that our hearts and bodies are parts of us.
I am particularly struck by how a shell moves and grows. I cannot believe that a baby snail is born with just the central spiral and that as they get older and bigger, the shell increases in size, adding spirals. I also am in total awe of how, when the foot of a snail moves forward, it narrows and projects forward. They eye stalks of the snail stretch out way ahead while the shell stays behind, for a while. Eventually, the shell will catch up, moving much more quickly than the soft parts moved, catching up with the rest of the body. It reminds me of how a dog runs to catch up with its human after stopping to sniff.
In this way the shell feels both inanimate and simultaneously like its own being. Although it is as much of a snail as our bones are a part of us, the shell of a snail seems to me, and perhaps to Rohan, like a separate entity all together.
Was Rohan amazed that the snail has to carry the weight of this proportionately — relative to the size of a snail’s foot — big shell? Does he, like I sometimes do, imagine the shell to be somewhat separate from the snail, like a back pack?
I asked Rohan some questions to get at this idea of whether he thought the shell was seprate or an integral part of teh snail. I asked if he thinks a snail can crawl out of its shell, and he said no. I asked if he thinks a snail is born with its shell, and he said yes!
So the question I have for both him and me is: What does it feel like for a snail to move with a shell and why, if we both think of a shell as integral to the snail, do we still, in a deep way, think of the shell as separate, as not really part of its body? Is it because we don’t have a shell and can’t empathize? Is it because we don’t have analogies to think with when it comes to conceptualizing what it feels like to have a shell?
I wonder how a snail experience its shell? Does it feel like something needing to be carried? Or is a snail's experience of carrying a shell like the experience of carrying our heads— not like carrying anything at all, unless, perhaps, our neck muscles are sore? I imagine that the experience of being a snail is so far from our own that I'd need much better and more analogies to think with before I start trying to ask what it's like for a snail to carry its shell. But I can think more about how I and how Rohan think about snails and snail shells.
I want to ask Rohan if he thinks a turtle carries its shell. I don’t think of a turtle shell in similar terms to a snail shell because I’ve seen a turtles skeleton and know that their shell is made up of their vertebrae and is very much attached to the rest of their body. A turtle’s shell feels much more integrated with turtles body than a snails. For one, it doesn’t sit at the vertical top of the turtle only; it surrounds the turtle. On part of the turtle doesn't move forward as the shell stays behind. And unlike a snail, a turtle’s shell "matches" its skin— they’re both patterned with polygons and and have a dry, leathery look. By contrast, a snail’s shell is hard while the body parts that emerge from it and move it around, are soft, mushy, slimy and cold.
So, how do we conceptualize snails and their shells? Do we think of them as separate, as integrated? Do we think of shells as houses, as body parts? And where does this thinking come from? What are we drawing upon to make these analogies? And how do we deepen our understanding of snails and their shells, constructing new, more nuanced analogies that allow us to use our own bodies or to other things in the world to better understand snails and their shells?
Tuesday, October, 17th, 2017
I was sitting with a little person named Maddie — a different Maddie from the Maddie who named the bumble bee snail. We may have been looking at the snail with a macro lens or "just" with our own eyes when Maddie said, “Snails have little dot eyes, we have big dot eyes”.
When you look at a snail closely, you’ll see that on top of its eye stalks — the long tentacles sticking out of the snail’s upper head — there is a tiny black dot. When Maddie made the connection between the little dot in the the snail’s eye with the one in our own eyes I wanted to make sure that I was connecting the same exact dots she was (pun intended)😋 so I asked some questions.
I asked her to look in my eye and tell me the color of my "big dot". My eyes are light brown, but I guessed that she was referring to the pupil, not the iris when she said "big dot,"" so I assumed she'd say black. When she looked in my eye she began to brown and then corrected herself, “Black!”
Then Maddie pulled down the bottom of her eye, “this is the pink part,” she said. “Do snails have a pink part?” I asked. “No,” she said, with a smile and facial expression that kindly insinuated "What a silly idea!"
As someone who’s quite excited about thinking about how we construct connections and analogies between our bodies and those of other individual animals, I was excited by Maddie’s connection.
And then I started thinking— are the snails black dot in fact similar to ours? Is their black dot a pupil? This is something I have yet to research.
Wednesday, October 18th, 2017
Alex and Zoe were observing and drawing the snails this morning and began trying to draw the smallest possible snails they could. At one point, they were making dots, to represent the teeniest snail they reasonable represent without a magnifying glass. I then mentioned to them that there used to be a tiny baby snail in the terriarium — about the size of a large freckle — but it died.
Alex started asking questions about how big it was and where is it now. I had left the shell in the terrarium but couldn't find it, it is so tiny! Alex than asked approximately 10 times if I could find "the bone snail" I excited by her interest and was looking, but really couldn't find it. By "bone snail" I just thought she meant, the bone (aka the shell) of the tiny dead snail. But I was wrong, that's not what she meant at all. Finally, upon realizing that I was making assumptions, I asked Alex, "What's a bone snail?" and Alex explained her thinking.Alex wanted to find the dead snail because inside it would be "the snail's stomach and it's bones."
The next day, I sat with Alex for a while, filming and drawing snails. I asked her to draw the bone snail to show me what she thought the bones would look like and she drew the small snail with some black blobs inside that described, where the snail's bones. In addition she drew a cluster of tiny dnails that she described were what the snails looked like before they were born, and some tiny snails, that were what the snails look like after they're born.
After drawing the bone snail, she drew over it, burying it with the metaphorical dirt of pen ink since, of course, the bone snail is dead.
I'm interested in Alex's interest in the tiny snail — her interest in it's death, it's tiny-ness, it's insides. I find all of these incredibly interesting and rich too. In fact, when the tiny snail died, I was quite sad and felt really guilty. The thing that surprised me the most when I found it's empty shell was how delicate yet clear life and death seem to be. Even in the case of a teeny tiny snail the size of a freckle it's amazing how different life and death are — the difference between an empty shell and a shell with an animate, crawiling, eye-moving snail attached, captures so clearly and so fundamentally, the difference between the feeling of a living being and its shell.
Wednesday November, 29th, 2017
For almost a month, Luca has been drawing the snails. His drawings include shells, eyes, and lower tentacles he calls "drinkers" (because we once thought we saw a snail drink with them). Each time, his drawings incorporate some new details based on observations he's made. For the most part they're very true-to-life. The one exception: they're almost always blue. Luca has explained it's because blue is his favorite color. Despite his attachment to drawing increasingly realistic snails, Luca brings his own aesthetic to the work... and I've been quite inspired by this!
I've really enjoyed watching Luca's blue aesthetic unfold. It made me think about how to incorporate my aesthetic into my snail observations and documentation. Here's my first shot at something!