Author’s note: I first met Rachel Mylan through our neighborhood Buy Nothing group. She posted that she had 200 snails in need of rehoming and wondered if anyone was interested in adopting a gastropod. While I wasn’t prepared for the responsibility of pet snail ownership, I had a billion questions about why she had 200 snails to rehome. It turns out, snails are excellent classroom pets, and they’ve been a helpful tool in her educator’s toolbox. Since so many of the classrooms she worked with in previous years are not meeting in-person this year, she found herself a bit overwhelmed with snails. Mylan asked me to emphasize that garden snails have no business outside in Chicago because they have the potential to become an invasive species. This post was written by, me, Lindsay Welbers. All photos were provided by Rachel Mylan. Our conversation has been edited below.
Rachel Mylan is out to change the way kids look at snails – one slime trail at a time.
While working as a teacher in a California preschool classroom, Mylan became fascinated with the average garden snail. The Chicago-area native first noticed the tiny gastropods while standing outside on a 24-hour diner named Norm’s on a rainy night.
Snails, like the slugs and earthworms common in the Great Lakes region, are most active when it rains. Mylan scooped one up, put it in an empty fish tank in her home, and accidentally started keeping pet snails.
“I was just amazed by them. You bring them into the classroom and kids are in awe of them and even your rowdiest three-year-old will sit in amazement watching a snail move very slowly across a piece of paper,” Mylan said. “I realized there was this magic quality about them, they sort of draw people in.”
After a few days, she would let them loose in her garden. But when she moved back to Chicago three years ago, the snails came with her.
Because they lay so many eggs, snails are considered an invasive species anywhere they are not native. In Texas, invasive snails have devastated crops and vegetative ground cover, while out-competing the region’s native snails. In Florida, invasive snails have been found in over half of the state’s watersheds.
“Snails are a really natural phenomenon in California,” Mylan said. Switching jobs meant moving out of the classroom and into work with a nonprofit that trains teachers. “That’s where the sort of snail breeding situation came to be. I was working with all these teachers,” Mylan said. “I had snails that I brought with me from California. They had so many babies I didn’t know what to do with them.”
Snails, it turns out, make great classroom pets. They live in a tank, enjoy an occasional misting of water to keep damp, and they eat mostly vegetables.
“Snails are, like, really hearty and really they don’t need very much. So from that angle, they’re a really good classroom pet. Leave them alone over winter break, and that’s good for them because they hibernate and that’s how they grow,” Mylan said.
The snails Mylan keeps are helix aspersa, the standard garden snail. In captivity they live for three to four years. “I think of snails as slow-motion puppies. If you watch them … if you really take time to watch them, snails are very curious and very playful.”
When a snail first hatches, it eats the shell of its egg casing to create the snail, that it carries on its back. When it first emerges from the ground, a snail is smaller than a pinkie fingernail, and within a year will be about the size of a quarter. Some of Mylan’s two-year-olds are the size of a half-dollar.
For a classroom pet, the snail’s characteristic slowness it’s part of its appeal. “Their life is eating vegetables, drinking water, they crawl around and play. They like climbing, going under things, and crawling around. That’s pretty much their lives.”
Mylan said she see snails playing with each other all the time. Little snails catching piggyback rides on larger snails, or snails holding their face up to the misting water, apparently in enjoyment. Pretty charismatic for something that creates its own trail of slime and it uses to slide along on one giant muscle.
Because a snail is capable of reproducing after one year. And because snails are hermaphroditic, any snail can mate with any other snail. Mylan likes to point out that means that snails are neither “he” nor “she,” so she uses “they” pronouns when discussing the snails and their habits. It’s one of the ways she uses snails to open a door to larger social-emotional conversations with the preschool and kindergarten kids who have snails in their classrooms.
“Kids are sitting on the edge of a much thinner threshold of amazement and they see things and notice things. They take time to figure things out because they’re seeing everything for the very first time,” Mylan said.
“When I was a school director in my hallway we had a snail tank instead of a fish tank. We did that as a goodbye spot for kids who were having a hard time saying goodbye to their parents. The kids would say ‘look at that snail, he looks sad’ and they would point to a snail who was maybe off by itself.”
Her school’s snail tank created an opening for kids to single out the physical manifestation of an emotion, and in doing so learn about their own emotions.
“They say toddlers aren’t always known for being slow and gentle and I’ve seen so many rambunctious kids who are able to really fully sit down, hold the snail, and adapt their physical needs to what the snail needs. You have to wait patiently for it to come out of its shell. All sorts of creatures have very different needs and its part of it,” Mylan said.
Interested in keeping a pet snail of your own? Mylan will have more snails available when the next clutch is ready to graduate out of her tank. Reach out to her directly at midwestsnailsforce at gmail dot com or find her on Instagram at @snailsforce. Teachers, especially, should reach out to her about classroom education opportunities.
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