I was walking along Humboldt Bay when I heard, “Psst. Hey!” A Lewis’s moon snail (Neverita lewisii) was calling me from a shallow pool in the tidal mudflat.
The snail said, “I want to enter the big baking contest. But those jerk-offs will never let a snail win. So, can you pose as me? Plus, I need you to bring me the ingredients for a blackberry pie, but replace the shortening with chicken fat. That’s a sure-fire winning secret. When they award my prize, I’ll reveal myself.”
I stared at her almost-spherical light brown and white shell and her large round foot. She looked like a thick-crust extra-cheese pizza with a baseball stuffed into it. And as big as her shell was, her foot seemed far too big to fit inside.
I was pleased to see her intact shell because I only find fragments of moon snail shells washed up on open-ocean beaches. I’m guessing these pieces are broken while the shells travel out of the bay on tidal currents or in dredging spoils. I also noticed her extended tubular siphon, which didn’t seem capable of speech, and her four short sensory tentacles that seemed useless for making pies.
“Whoa,” I said, “But how are you going to roll out a crust?”
“When moon snails lay eggs, we mix thousands of them with sand and mucous, and then form this mixture into a wide, collar-shaped ribbon. It looks like a piece of faded truck tire innertube. A large female like me can make one the size of a pie crust. I’ll just sub the crust ingredients in place of the eggs and mucous.”
“OK, but what does a predator of other mollusks know about fruit pies? Look at the beveled small round holes in all these clam shells.”
“The rudimentary eyes on two of my sensory tentacles cannot resolve that. But yes, I drill into mollusk shells using my rasping tongue, or radula, aided by a mild acid that I discharge through my mouth. I can drill only about a half a millimeter a day, so I prefer thin-shelled clams. Then I inject digestive enzymes into the hole and lap up the slurry. So, yes, fruit pies probably taste nasty. But I want glory, not dessert.”
I wondered how I’d get an aquatic invertebrate safely to the award ceremony. Well, it turns out that a moon snail’s foot is huge because it is pumped up with water. They use this inflated foot to plow through the mudflat, digging up clams like a bulldozer. But they can shed that water through their siphon, fit back into the shell, and then seal themselves inside using a flat fingernail-like door called an “operculum,” which is attached to the foot. They can also absorb air through their skin and can supposedly live out of water for a week.
At the award ceremony, the emcee said, “Folks, there’s been a terrorist attack on our esteemed panel of judges. We found a blackberry pie spiked with mud and sharp bits of shell. Deport him!” He pointed at me as masked thugs zip-tied my wrists.
I expected to see the moon snail high-tailing it for the exit. But she said, “Let him go! It was I, the moon snail, who made that pie from scratch. I thought the chicken fat crust would make up for the debris. It was all due to my hubris and incompetence, and I am sorry.”
I thought such a rare display of honesty and humility would get her set free. But instead, the jerk-offs beat her to death with a flagpole.
Biologist Mike Kelly (he/him) is also the author of the book Tigerfish: Traditional and Sport Fishing on the Niger River, Mali, West Africa. It’s available at Amazon or everywhere e-books are sold.
This article appears in ‘Bigger Than All of Us’.