Giant African land snail
The giant African land snail is one of the biggest land snails in the world. Its brown, pointy shell can grow 20 centimetres long, longer than a pencil. It comes from East Africa, but people carried it to many warm countries.
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Fun facts
Its eggs are white, about 5 millimetres long, and have a thin hard shell like tiny bird eggs.
A baby snail's shell is only about 5 millimetres long when it hatches.
Young snails have stripy brown and cream shells, but the new parts that grow later are smooth and shiny brown.
It is the snail that most often moves into new countries where it does not belong.
In the United States it is against the law to sell or keep one.
Most asked questions about Giant African land snail
?How big do giant African land snails get?
The shell can be 20 centimetres long or more and about 7 centimetres wide.
?What do giant African land snails eat?
They eat many kinds of plants, including crops and garden plants.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Lissachatina fulica
- Group
- Snails, slugs and worms
- Family
- Achatinidae
- Classification
- Gastropoda > Stylommatophora > Achatinidae
- Lives on
- Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, North America, South America
- Also known as
- Giant African snail
Where the facts come from
- Lissachatina fulica (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Alexander R. Jenner. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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