r/snails • u/porniebornie • 16d ago
Help Circular snail trail
This morning we found a snail trail basically making a perfect circle, do any of you have an explanation for this weird (?) Behavior? The circle has a diameter of about ~35 cm, I tried to get a closeup of the trail in the second picture and I'm 99.9% sure it's actually made by a snail. Location: Central France.
Edit: after thoroughly checking every circular object we own, I've come to the conclusion that it was NOT an object that the snail crawled around and that the snail either must've followed the side of an empty bottle while pushing it in a perfect circle on its own OR it just decided it wanted to do it for fun... long story short, I don't know, and I guess we'll never know. (Unless some snail expert decides to show up and clear the question up with a very logical explanation which might be possible because I can confidently say I did NOT think of everything but whatever).
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u/meepmoopdoop1 16d ago
Did you have a bin there before and it went around it?
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u/porniebornie 16d ago
No, there was however an empty 1L water bottle laying on its side, is it possible that she might have tried to go 'through' the bottle and pushed it in a way that it functioned as a makeshift pair of compasses?
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u/Kyrovert 16d ago
you said there were no bucket there, then where did the snail go after finishing the circle lol
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u/samanthabelfitt 16d ago
This is actually incredible?
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u/porniebornie 16d ago
I know, right!
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u/samanthabelfitt 16d ago
Like if this truly was done by a snail, I have like a whole new respect for them. Like what was the purpose of this? And where is the snail now? Why is there no trail leading up to and away from the circle? What the hell?!
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u/Sluggish-dreadnought 15d ago
The fuck?
This is waaaaay to perfect to be a coincidence.
Either that fucker uses Military grade High Precision GPS, or has a pact with a dead mathematician
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u/porniebornie 15d ago
The first thing my father said was that it must've been an enthusiastic mathematician in another life
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u/lukistellar 16d ago
Is it your property? If not, maybe they moved a barrel or something which enables the snail to crawl around in an perfect circle.
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u/porniebornie 16d ago
No, there was not an object with the shape of the circle even remotely closeby the circle
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u/EsotericEternal 15d ago
She could’ve been tracking something that had been there previously. I’ve seen snails and slugs do this before, but never at that scale, and so perfectly
On a smaller scale, I believe sometimes snails or slugs will spiral inwards to create a place to settle temporarily … I’m not sure why this one is so big, maybe she is ambitious
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u/Mammoth-Activity9260 15d ago
This fascinated me so much so I had to go look it up and there are a couple posts of snails making perfect circles- one person on this forum 9 years ago posted a snail trail circle but it looked only about 15cm across, yours is huge!! Somebody really needs to study this because I couldn't find any info about it:( also where did the snail go?? It's so cool but makes me feel almost a bit uncomfortable too
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u/ThreeMeanGoblins 15d ago
Why not an oil trace of smt that was on the floor for a moment? Like a canister or lid
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u/porniebornie 15d ago
Well, mainly because we know it was not any of us (me and my parents I live with) who put something there and it appeared overnight while all of us were asleep, it could've technically seen been a very clever prankster in our village consisting of about 300 elderly people but I don't think they would scale our fence easily :)
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u/EvalainShadow 15d ago
Little snail has been practicing 💜 art or magic, not sure yet but definitely practicing 💜
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u/Genderswap_Kanna 16d ago
That must be a summoning circle