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Sticker of Vineyard snail
Bug card No. 4589 of 4,939

Vineyard snail

Caucasotachea vindobonensis
Name means: “named after Vindobona, an old Celtic town that is now the city of Vienna”
Eats: PlantsSnails, slugs and wormsGardens and meadowsNo legsNot an insect, but a bug cousin

The vineyard snail carries a round, pale shell with brown stripes, like a little striped ball. It is a fairly big land snail from central and eastern Europe. On hot summer days it climbs up tall plants and rests there.

Fun fact: this one is not an insect at all, it has no legs! But kids find it on every bug hunt, so it lives in Bug Wiki too.
Lives in
Central and eastern Europe and the Balkans, now also in New York and Quebec
Length
2 to 2.5 cm (0.79 to 0.98 in)
the width of the shell
Top speed
about 0.03 km/h (0.02 mph)
On foot, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. Wash your hands after holding one, like after touching any wild animal.
What does it eat?
Like other land snails it eats plants, scraping them with its rough tongue.
For real!Photo of Vineyard snail
Picture by Robert Nordsieck (Rnordsieck). CC BY-SA 2.0 de, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Vineyard snail about 2.5 cm long (0.98 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)A crayon about 9 cm (3.5 in)
as long as 4 grains of rice in a rowneeds 2 minutes to cross a dinner table

How big is Vineyard snail compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

Its shell usually has five brown stripes, but the top two are often very faint.

2

The lip of its shell is brown inside and pale outside. That helps people tell it apart from the grove snails that often live next to it.

3

It can live for about 7 years.

4

Each year a grown snail lays about 50 round eggs, each only 3 millimetres wide. The babies hatch after about 18 days.

5

It sleeps through the winter from about November to March.

you asked

Most asked questions about Vineyard snail

?How big is the vineyard snail?

Its shell is about 20 to 25 millimetres wide.

?How long does a vineyard snail live?

Up to about 7 years. It becomes grown up after its second year.

?Where does the vineyard snail live?

In open woods, meadows and grassy places in central and eastern Europe.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Caucasotachea vindobonensis
Group
Snails, slugs and worms
Family
Helicidae
Classification
Gastropoda > Stylommatophora > Helicidae
Lives on
Europe, North America

Where the facts come from

  1. Caucasotachea vindobonensis (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by Robert Nordsieck (Rnordsieck). CC BY-SA 2.0 de, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this 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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