Great ramshorn
The great ramshorn is a water snail with a flat, round shell coiled up like a ram's horn. It is the biggest ramshorn snail in Europe. It slides along water plants in quiet ponds and rivers.
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Fun facts
Its blood has a red protein called hemoglobin, like ours. It helps the snail live in water with very little air.
It has two ways to breathe. In fresh water it takes air through its skin, and in stale water it pokes a little tube up to the surface to fill its lung.
Its shell looks like it curls one way, but it really curls the other way.
Baby snails have tiny hairs on their shells.
In an aquarium it can live for up to 6 years.
Most asked questions about Great ramshorn
?How big is the great ramshorn snail?
Its shell is usually about 3.5 centimetres across, sometimes up to 4 centimetres.
?How does the great ramshorn breathe underwater?
It takes in oxygen through its skin, or comes up and fills its lung through a little tube.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Planorbarius corneus
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Snails, slugs and worms
- Family
- Planorbidae
- Classification
- Gastropoda > Hygrophila > Planorbidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia
Where the facts come from
- Planorbarius corneus (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 Claus Ableiter. 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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