03/20/2026
3 different snail species, all the same age! Look at the sheer size difference between them all! Born at the end of 2025, the Snails displayed are the Copse Snail (largest snail), a Milk Snail (middle sized snail) and a Carthusian Snail (smallest snail). This really visually helps display what I run into with snail species and their availability over time!
Snails are one of the few groups of invertebrates in the pet trade that have active growth rates, they don't stop to molt a new exoskeleton or pupate into an adult stage, they just keep growing as they get older! Now, why are these 3 so drastically different? Well their adult sizes of course are quite offset from each other! Carthusians are the smallest of the 3 growing around the size of a dime fully grown as a Medium-Small species. But the Copse Snail is bigger than the Milk Snail, even though a fully grown Milk Snail (Medium-Large) is far larger than an adult Copse Snail (Medium).
You can really judge a lot of Snails approximate growth rates by the thickness of their shells! Copse Snails for example, have very thin shells and live in very humid climates and aren't a terribly arboreal species so they can afford to produce much thinner and lighter shells, allowing them to grow at a faster rate! Milk Snails on the other hand are a subtropical species but tend to live in environments that get very long dry spells, on top of going dormant above the ground on plants, debris and other material, so they need to develop far thicker shells to prevent moisture loss and to protect themselves if they fall from a far height!
A less extreme example of this is seen in one of Ontario's most common Snails the Brown-Lipped Grove Snail, they have nearly identical behavior but are a more temperate wetland/grassland specialized species, hence why they do so well around humans! Carthusian Snails are a similar case! Despite being so relatively smaller, they have the exact same behavior as these other species but prefer to go dormant on very tall, thinner plants such as native grasses and wildflowers (I.e. Goldenrod)!
