Snails and their homing instinct

Just watching a programme on TV where they divided a garden into 4 quads, gathered up all the snails from each area and coloured their shells a colour for each quad.
They were then released and almost all of them when checked the next night were in the 'right' quad.

Apparently about 25m is the limit so if you collect snails from your garden - you need to go for a short walk to the nearest park/roadside/scrub area and leave them there.

If you want to read more just search 'snail homing instinct' and there's plenty of articles about it.

I'll be taking a bucket load to the woods later today

Morphic
Resonance?

a reply to: johnb

Interesting. We get snails all the time in the yard. When the weather gets warmer and they show up, I might try moving them to see.

originally posted by: Cloudbuster
Morphic
Resonance?

Stink, probably.

There was a snail in my pub the other night, he'd had way too much to drink and in the end I had to kick him out.

3 days later there's a knock on the door, when I opened it was the snail with a confused angry face.

He simply said "What did you do that for???"

*grabs coat, sprints*

Well, folks here in the States would call 25m something like 82ft, that is quite a distance for a snail to navigate back to their home turf!

I wonder if our garden snails do the same and if they navigate mostly based on scent and taste? I guess I should look into that.

I don't mind garden snails so much as firefly larva feed on them to become adult fireflies. So without snails, there would be no fireflies.

a reply to: MichiganSwampBuck

Now that would be the only reason I would leave them alone

Unfortunately they are extremely rare round these parts (never seen any but a cple of friends have a few times) just checked a blog on sightings in the UK and there's only a few (although a few close enough)

glowworm survey in UK link