Super Fast Garden Snails
I woke up this rainy morning to find a couple snails in our front yard. One was on the sidewalk leading up to our front door while the other was starting to crawl up a white lawn chair on our porch. Here in Toronto, it’s not so uncommon to see snails – I don’t really remember seeing any in Calgary though.
After I took these photos, I went back outside to measure one of the blades of grass from the photos (I just mowed the lawn ) and it measured 15mm long. With that, I calculated that this snail had travelled 42mm in 47 seconds. At that speed, it would take the snail 11.2 seconds to travel one centimeter, or 19 minutes to travel one meter. In one minute, the snail would travel 54mm and it would take an hour for it to travel 3.2m, which translates to a speed of 0.003km/h. that’s a super fast garden snail! haha
Apparently, the fastest speed a garden snail can travel is 0.048km/h though, (according to my quick Google search) which seems a little fast to me. It means in the 47 seconds between the two photos, the snail could have travelled a whopping 63cm (627mm). That doesn’t seem right. What do you think?