In one of my little wanders around the garden as an interlude I spotted a snail having a go ad some bird shit.
So, do they eat it? I’m not going to spoil speculation by trying to look it up, obviously. And given that it’s a snail I can’t quite insist that it found it to be fingerlickin’ good.
But I don’t know what snails do eat – something about their mouth being in their stomach or something – and thus whether bird poo would be on the menu. For all I know soon to be guano is sufficiently acerbic to melt them.
They eat green stuff – preferably new growth emerging innocently from seed. They also eat slug pellets – I’d buy mine from the FSB if they made them.
Don’t snails become bird shit…?
I used to tell the other kids at school that slugs grew out of flicked snotters.
As TMB says, vegetarians. I leave ours as the glow-worm larvae parasitise them so we get a few glow-worms in the garden every year.
They’re vegetarians, although if they don’t get enough calcium in their diet they’ll start rasping holes in the shells of other snails.
It’s a problem for people keeping snails as pets or farming them to eat – they’ll potentially kill each other if they aren’t fed the right stuff.
Snails eat bird poo for the calcium in the poo from birds eating snails.
1.…and guess who feeds on bird shit? The snails, of course! …
2. Bird poop solves the paradox of the snail
“I used to tell the other kids at school that slugs grew out of flicked snotters.”
I convinced some younger kids that peanut butter was made from the scrapings from under old ladies’ toenails.
Theo – that’s a level of creative cruelty worthy of Roald Dahl
Some garlic and butter will cover the taste.
Theo, yes, such persuasions work best when there’s a reasonable degree of plausibility.
One summer we ate lots of snails from the garden. You confine them in a bucket for a few days and supply them with lettuce leaves and frequent changes of water so that any nasty stuff has passed through them and been chucked away. They taste just like French snails i.e. of garlic and rubber.
Was going to mention the parasite that completes its life cycle via emails eating bird droppings but just saw it’s in Pcar’s link.
So how about slugs that eat baby birds instead?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2102924-monster-slugs-are-devouring-defenceless-baby-birds-in-nests/
(Apologies for NS link)
@MyBurningEars, March 12, 2018 at 1:04 am
Is a parasite in an email a virus?
They eat my lettuces and the thushes and I eat them (We share)
Nothing eats birdshit.
Dearieme
Thay are the same variety – petit gris, but ours slide on the left.