Snails navigate primarily by chemoreception, or the sense of smell, and mechanoreception, or the sense of touch. They will move toward attractive odors, such as food or mates, and they will withdraw from noxious odors and tactile disturbance.

Snails can’t make quick getaways, so exposing themselves like this is dangerous, crazily dangerous. Snails have a lot to think about when they make love—because they’re hermaphrodites. Unlike you, garden snails can produce sperm like males and carry eggs like females at the same time.

Snails don’t bond with humans the same way that for example a dog would, BUT there is a lot you can do to improve their trust in you. Like any animals, they will begin to like anything that means they’re about to get good food, and also many snails adore getting under slowly falling warm water, so use those creatively.

Snails are quite sensitive to high levels of toxins in the water, so if you don’t keep up with water changes in your tank and the water becomes high in levels of ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates, your snails could die, along with some of your fish. Snails need more than just algae and detritus to survive.

The cerebral ganglia of the snail form a primitive brain which is divided into four sections. This structure is very much simpler than the brains of mammals, reptiles and birds, but nonetheless, snails are capable of associative learning.

There are some kinds of RNA that, instead of carrying messages, help switch genes on and off. They have been shown to be involved in long-term memory in snails, mice and rats, through their ability to influence chemical tags on DNA.

Snails use two brain cells to make “complex decisions”, a team of scientists has found. Researchers at the University of Sussex said one cell told the snail if it was hungry while the other cell told it if food was present.

Snails like other invertebrates do not have a spinal cord nor one single brain. Instead they have a set of ganglia (groupings of neurons) that distribute the control of the various parts of the snail.

Most land snails, or pulmonates, are hermaphrodites, meaning they possess both male and female sexual organs. However, land-oriented prosobranch snails, as well as many water snails, are dioecious, meaning they can be either male or female. If you don’t see one, the snail is female.