The snail has about 25 thousand teeth. They are not located in rows, but in the form of a “grater”, with the help of which they grind food. The largest number of teeth nature provided the American garden snail.
Her tongue is seated with 135 rows of teeth of 105 teeth in each row. When a snail “gnaws” an underground corridor, it wields … .14 175 teeth!
It is worth noting that these are not exactly those teeth that we usually mean. In the oral cavity of the cochlea there are so-called radulas – a special apparatus, more like a grater. Here, rather, it is important not how much the snail teeth, and how they work.
Located on the surface of the odontophora (a kind of “tongue”) the radula serves not for biting, but for scraping and chopping food. It consists of a chitinous basal plate and chitinous teeth located across several hundred rows.
All this apparatus operates on the principle of a dredger, which has as many buckets as a snail of teeth. It is these horn formations that scrape off the nutrient that then enters the digestive tract. Some kinds of gastropods are used as a drill, with the help of which a snail opens the shell of its victim.
