ALWAYS CHECK BEFORE YOU DESTROY

Each year my garden is plagued by snails and pill bugs. For their size, the snails are barely 1/4" in diameter, they certainly can do a lot of destruction. They can home in on the seedlings as they break the surface of the ground and chew away at the lower parts of the stem until the plant just withers away and dies. It isn't true that they only eat decaying material although I'm sure they do their fair share of that too.

So when I spotted one of these while removing some frost damaged vegetation it got a quick crushing. For some reason I knew this was a decollate snail. It is the only snail name I know and I really know nothing about it. All I was thinking was BIG SNAIL. Moving around I came across a small pile of about 8 oak leaves. Since there is no oak tree around I found the pile rather puzzling. Ye gads, underneath were 5 of these snails! Crushed. Now I started to poke around in earnest and found several more. I'm being taken over, I thought. I picked up one to photograph and then went inside and put in 'decollate snail' on google. I was right, Rumina decollata.

What have I done! This is a good snail. He goes around eating all the other snails and slugs. He's a gardener's friend. You can buy him on the internet. Does he eat seedlings too, I wonder?When I find more shall I let them be?

I put back the one I had photographed right next to a big fat slug hiding under the edge of a stone. I hope Rumina had him for supper.