Grinnin' and pickin' OR From the Annals of Never Again Cited Research

Exhibit A. The author, birthday princess, destroys crustaceans as celebration ritual. Date? Let's just say: pre-Y2K.
At right, the one remaining shot glass I can find. There was definitely an "I got crabs in Maryland" one at some point.

A lot of people, especially in the PNW, love crabs because they are tasty, but, and here is a confession that I hope nobody ever finds out: I don't eat crabs [anymore]. I grew up in Maryland and every year for my birthday we'd pick blue crabs. I remain fiercely proud of that part of my heritage, as evidenced my collection of unused shot glasses. But by college I had phased all meat, including seafood, out of my diet. My crab-picking skills, earned at the cost of a thousand million cuts to that sensitive part of my fingers between the nail and last knuckle, seasoned with Old Bay and left sizzling for days(1), are moot, a party trick at best.

I love crabs because they are fierce, because they have personality, and they have a rep for holding it down in the intertidal. I enjoy feeding crabs by hand because I'm a total weirdo, and I find it completely satisfying. Here, you watch this and tell me if I'm crazy.

Super intense, right!?(2)

There are numerous examples in the literature of crabs keeping snails at bay by just straight up eating them. Thus, you might surmise, if you have read way back in this blog to the part where I used to write about actual science that I actually did, that I would be reeeeeeeally curious to see if crabs would eat any of my invasive snails - in particular my favorite Mollusca Non-Grata, the Japanese oyster drill (Ocenebra inornata(3)). Previous research, done by,  *cough cough*, yours truly, pointed to at least a willingness of crabs to eat these snails when you throw them in a bucket together. But that's frankly pretty unimpressive - crabs will eat anything you throw them in a bucket with. What happens in natura(4)?

It was just like this...Photo of the author in her natural habitat
Credit: Nima Yazdani.

Answering that question was the goal of my summer of 2011. And if you're wondering, gee, Emily, that was HALF OF A DECADE AGO, why are you telling us about this now? It turns out half a decade is exactly how long it took me to get this work published(5)!

I'll set the scene: Emily, way out on a beautifully restored native oyster bed on only the sunniest of sunny PNW days, clean and well rested, scratching her chin and waxing genius about ecological dynamics of restoration.

J slash K. It was nothing like that. I had so much generous help. Second off, it never looked like I had it together out there even for a second. Field work is a slog. When you do work in the intertidal, it's a panicked slog, as you race to get your work done before the tide comes back. In the muddy intertidal, it's a panicked slog in painful, hilariously clumsy, slow motion as you race against the returning tide ankle deep in mud. I consider myself relatively fleet of foot in moving across mud in waders, but it's not pretty, I assure you.

So I called for help. I had a slew of helpers: 

• Nima, a classmate's husband, who was interested in seeing what the work of scientists actually looks like. He took the beautiful picture above.  I'm grateful not to have seen any close ups of what I actually looked like that day. 
• Avanthi, a classmate's girlfriend (now wife :) ), who was an amazing trooper, helping me swap out oysters on very little sleep as I recall. 
• Marie, my actual classmate, she and I carried approximately 17 million tons of rebar down the shore and across the mud - how we did it, I can't remember. I think it was one of those, well, there's really no one else who's going to do it if we don't - moments.

I also had excellent logistical support from a number of people:

• Brian Allen at Puget Sound Restoration Fund helped me get access to the oyster beds, which were under PSRFs restoration care - they put out old oyster shell to provide habitat for new babies to settle on. Brian also tried his best to teach me to pilot a tiny Whaler with an outboard, and I discovered that there are some skills that I need more than 2.5 minutes to learn. To this day, I cannot operate an outboard.
• Joth who gave me sacrificial oysters from his own farm! That's right, the shirt off his back to support graduate research. 
• Molly and her father Greg, who helped ferry me said oysters.
• Jen, my advisor, who taught me how to make oyster pops, and helped me secure lots of random supplies for building cages. "Sure, you need 20 old oyster bags? I'll have Alan bring them up and leave them outside Kincaid". 
• Not LEAST, Dave and Sue, the amazing couple who not only helped me get beach access from shore (note previous comment about inability to learn how to pilot a boat), but invited me in for coffee (pre tide flat) and soda (post tide flat) multiple times. Seriously, I can't tell you how much I love meeting the lovely shoreline owners!

This list doesn't even include my co-author Eric, who stuck it out with me through a long writing, rewriting, analyzing, re-analyzing, revising, and, yes, re-revising, which was evidently so traumatic that it caused his lung call it quits and spontaneously collapse. Sorry, Eric.

So that picture where I'm out there looking like John Muir on my own doing science and looking ruggedly picturesque - that's not what it's like. This is a list of 11 people who made this one tiny(6) experiment possible, and that doesn't include the grad students who reached deep into their closets and donated as many wire hangers as they could muster (which, naturally, I didn't end up needing...), and Alan who drove the oyster bags up from Willapa, and Eddie who tolerated the mess I made on the loading dock, and the guy who stole all the rebar from the loading dock - wait that last one maybe doesn't need a thank you.

But you get the point. It takes a village people, this is how the sausage is made, and now the paper is published (Link here click on me, I am a link and I will take you to Emily and Eric's paper, and you clicking on me will increase the paper stats! Even if you don't think that sort of thing should be important, it is. So click on me, come on, why haven't you clicked yet? Seriously, you read this far and haven't clicked? For Shame! <--Did you find the Easter egg in there? is it an Easter egg if I tell you it's in there?). 

In classic Emily style, I managed to get my act together to write this post only too late to give you access to the paper via the temporary open access link. Now it is paywalled (but you can email me). So I'll have to write another post where I tell you what all the fuss was even for, but first, I have to remember.

TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT

(Fair warning: there's a good chance you will be disappointed).


References and Miscellany
1. Seriously, I love Old Bay, but the trauma of picking remains in my flesh memory. 
2. Confession number two of this post: mostly I just put that music on there to cover up my voice in the video. I thought this added an air of drama to the proceedings. The crabs I trained to eat from my forceps were really chill, they knew they didn't need to go crazy to get their din din.
3. For more history on previous work with this species, check out OG Blog stuffs here and here.
4. How completely obnoxious is it to say it in Latin instead of just swapping the last "a" for an "e"?!
5. Even after I quadrupled the number of monkeys working at typewriters and it STILL took that long!
6. Really, I can't even tell you how small this in the scheme of things, and yet what an unbelievable amount of work it was.

Yellow-Bellied Snails OR MORE SNAIL MAIL!!!

Ground Control to Major Emily.

Yeah, Ground Control. Go ahead.

Uhhh, you still doing science out there, Major Emily? 

Sorta, Ground Control. It's complicated.  

...


Well here's some snail mail. New arrivals from Georgia (Fig.1)!

Figure 1. I do declare! Southern snails! We share a love of sitting on the porch drinking mint juleps.

These snails just completed an amazing transcontinental voyage (and, boy, are their arms tired! Just kidding, they don't have arms). Like other molluscan mavens of aviation described on this blog, these guys know how to travel in style - which is to say in a plastic bag, in a cooler, in a box. These are Atlantic Oyster drills from Savannah, Georgia, which are being temporarily re-homed in quarantine in Washington State(1) while they await their opportunity to teach Science amazing things about assessing risk in new situations.

You might recall the Christmas-that-Emily-Ruined Special(2), well it turns out this is the snail I was actually talking about. When I collected this species from the invasive population here in Washington (Fig. 2), those snails stopped eating and hid when they smelled chemical cues from their injured friends - they didn't even need to smell the crab that was eating those friends. They just knew that something was wrong and beat it out of there. It turns out this response is common among invasive snails here, but not seen in native snails(3).

Figure 2. The author, ca. 2009, collecting invasive Urosalpinx cinerea from Long Island, Willapa Bay, WA.

So the question becomes, are these snail species better than our local native snail species at becoming invasive because they listen to their friends when their friends are in danger? That is, do the snails back at home, in Georgia and Massachusetts, also run for their lives when they hear their friends calling for help?  Or, did the pioneer Atlantic Oyster Drills, who left their cozy homes almost 100 years ago on a railroad car headed west to an unknown destiny, in search of a land of endless undespoiled mud to roam, act basically the same as our local native snail species, and natural selection has changed the behavior of the population.  It's possible that the snails that were, quite literally, dumped from the railroad car on arrival, were all basically clueless about the predators in Washington, but some of the snails in that group did run and hide when they heard their friends calling for help when the native predators did attack - and that those snails were the only ones that survived out of the initial emigrees. They were the only ones who could reproduce, and now we have a population where that is the default response.  

Was the invasion caused by snails that listened to their scared friends, or did it result from the invasion that we now have snails that heed the warnings of other snails?

Yellow-Bellied Snails: Invasion Drivers or Survivors?

Since no one back in the early 1900's thought to do the same experiments I have done on the source populations for our invasive snails, and because the logic of time travel makes my head hurt, I'm going to do what is called substituting space for time. If we assume that there has been relatively little change in the Georgian and Massacusettsian (?) snails in the last 100 years(4), we can compare modern east coast snails (in skinny jeans, on their iPhones) to the invasive west coast population. We would predict not only that the Washington population would be more passive-aggressive, but also that they would respond similarly to the east coast snails if running away from cries of help is an invasion driver, or they would respond differently if running away was a trait that was only helpful in the new Washingtonian waters.

Ergo the snails from Georgia, now to keep my fingers crossed that the Masshole snails will make an appearance.  

Fig. 3. Snails from native and non native populations could demonstrate a variety of hypothesized responses that may or may not be related to their native culture and geographic origin.

References and Miscellany:
(1). Don't worry folks, I've got a permit and a lot of bleach and I know how to use 'em.
(2). Specifically Act II, Scene 1.
(3). More on that at some point - it's not really ready for showtime.
(4). This really only applies to the assumption that the selection for response to injured conspecifics hasn't changed, of course there have been other changes. If there have been, for instance, predators that have invaded on the east coast (cough cough, european green crab, I'm looking at you) east coast snails might also have evolved a strong response to injured conspecifics by the same mechanism of the snails that are invasive here. Actually, now that I think about it, that's one good reason to compare snails from both Massachusetts (where the Green Crab has invaded) AND Georgia (where the green crab has not invaded)

Christmas Present #2 OR Red Rock Crabs Rampage

About this time last year, I found out my first paper had been accepted.  Today, I got my second academic Christmas present (hint: it's not a pony, either).

My second, and final, paper from my Master's work was published today in PLoS ONE.  

Woohoo!

That means it's open access, and you can download your very own copy for free!

If you prefer to read my editorialized summary in a more...engaging?...voice, I wrote a little thing for SciPos, UW Biology's Grad Blog. 

Babies eatin' babies OR Auntie Pride

Congratulations to me: I’m a mom, well an Auntie anyway.  In addition to being a real Auntie of the incomparable, amazing, accomplished, Margaret (incidentally, about to fete the completion of her first year), I have recently also become Auntie hundreds of times over.  Unfortunately, the number of times over that I am an Auntie is now rapidly diminishing as my molluscan nieces and nephews eat each other. 


Whoops. 

And except for the cannibalism, I couldn't be prouder!  Actually the cannibalism is kind of cool, too, so maybe I just couldn't be prouder!  Now, like any self respecting Auntie, I will subject hapless friends and strangers to stories, photos, and videos of my nieces and nephews doing THE MOST AMAZING THINGS!  Because even though they are invasive brats (don't worry, I'm being responsible), they are the most amazing snails ever in the history of snails, because they are MY nieces and nephews.

This is video of one of the baby snails (Ocinebrina inornata) I am responsible for flipping itself over.  So you're looking from above at an upside-down snail under a dissecting scope (~10x), which is why the plane of focus is so narrow.  I am unable to tell you whether this particular snail is responsible for the death of any siblings, but chances are that she (or he) is.  But, isn't that AMAZING? MY snail just flipped itself over!  

Backstory: GO! About this time last year, I undertook cultivation of a laboratory colony of snails that could star in my dissertation research.  I’ll maybe talk more about why sometime later... maybe.  But the point is: I grow snails now.

And in the case of my pseudo-offspring, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and my snails are a bit, well, poorly socialized.  As I mentioned, they eat their kin.  But, in their defense, it’s not entirely their fault.  In my defense, the fratricide was not my idea.  It turns out, it is not unheard of for some species to practice sibling cannibalism before and after birth.  Sand tiger shark pups consume all the siblings in their mother’s womb, until only one pup remains.  Witness:

Cannibalism at this stage can be a strategy for increasing the success of surviving offspring.  The strongest individuals in a given brood, by consuming the weaker ones, get more food and grow more before birth/hatching etc.  This increases the chance they will survive being a tiny shark alone in the world without wasting the energy that mom expended in making those other babies, or having to compete with annoying siblings later in life.

Similarly, some snails are also known to get an early start on the predatory lifestyle while still in their mommy’s egg capsule.  These snails lay egg capsules (see below) that are attached to a hard surface.  Each capsule has a variable number of fertilized eggs in it, and a number of unfertilized “nurse eggs” or “trophic eggs”.  Snails will go through their larval development while still in the capsule, and feed off these trophic eggs until they are competent to hatch out as perfect lil’ mini snails.  It’s hard to tell in the case of these snails if they restrict their diet to the trophic eggs, or maybe occasionally slip and eat one of their siblings (or half-siblings).  In 1949 (old references are the best/worst to read), researchers at the Washington Dept of Fish and Wildlife counted (COUNTED!) an average of 1,543 eggs in each egg case, estimating that only 1% begin development, and even fewer make it to hatchin’ time.

Fambly Photo Album!

Here's some photo evidence from the crime scene.  DESCRIPTION AND DISCLAIMER: These were taken with some dirty optics and poor lighting, sorry. Also it was kind of difficult to determine whether focus was achieved until too late.  But you're looking through about 10x magnification on a dissecting scope.  I aspire to higher quality at some point, but this is all you get for now.

Early Life History Crime scene: A single egg capsule laid by Ocinebrina inornata, some of the juveniles have already hatched out as you can see the capsule is open at the top (left). 

OH NO! Snail casualty!  That gaping hole in this baby snail shell is telltale evidence of sibling cannibalism, the portal by which a brother or sister suckedthisguysgutsout! This dude is about 0.5mm long.  Note also that, when the hatch out, the snails first have this smooth white shell with a not very pointy top.  To learn why read: The Ballad of The Veliger.  

This one is a survivor!  Slightly older, this snail is perched on the edge of a barnacle many times his (or her) size.  As they grow and add new whorls, the snails, even though they are tiny (~2mm), really start to look like mini adults.

Old habits die hard, apparently, because the winners keep on chowing on their buddies after they leave their egg cases.  I’ve seen a lot of my babies go this way, and it’s sad.  I do my best to make sure they have enough non-sibling nourishment so they won’t be tempted into recidivism.  I’ve been told the best thing to feed them is extremely young barnacles, ones that have just settled out of the plankton.  Unfortunately, the timing is off this year, and I have plenty of adult barnacles, and some appropriately sized baby mussels.  I think they can tell that Auntie’s finger wagging just doesn’t carry the same authority as an actual parent, and my efforts at discipline and redirection aren’t working.  So let’s hope for the sake of my research that this is just a phase.

"More than Meets the Claw" OR "How Emily Ruined Christmas with Snails"

Thanks Santa Oyster Drill! This is the best Christmas EVAR!

Every year when I was growing up, I asked for a pony for Christmas.  Never sincerely, of course, because those things are heinously expensive.  But the request was good for a laugh/groan - I am the youngest and my "jokes" were probably humored to excess (this might explain why I have a blog).  My parents were always extremely generous in supporting my horse habit, but since ownership was out of the budget, instead there would be a joke about the pony not fitting in the garage, or some miscommunication and Santa thought I meant a pony ornament, etc.  

This year I got my metaphorical pony - in the form of a

 First.

-Authored.

Publication.  

True, it hasn't been on my list as long as the pony, but I asked Santa SO HARD for a first-authored publication.  Theodore and his brothers ain't got nothin' on my Christmas wishin'.  Now entered into the prestigious Annals of Never Again Cited Research:

That's right! Grason and Miner (2010) just got all up in your face! It's such a big deal it doesn't even fit in the column.  It's still only available on Online First, but will appear in print sometime next year (and get it's very own volume and page numbers! eeeeee!).  

Since many of you won't have access to the full text (open access is not free, my friends), I'll summarize.  In the spirit of the season, and with only minimal apologies for ruining Christmas for everyone, here is:

Emily's Christmas Pageant

The Ecology of Fear: Rudolph Redux

Act I: Two kinds of invasive snails (here depicted as Rudolph) eat fewer oysters (here depicted as a little tree Rudolph was inevitably going to otherwise eat) and hide more when they smell native crabs (here, the Abominable Snowman) eating their brethren.   Merry Christmas to oysters!

Where is Yukon Cornelius when you need him?!

Act II, Scene 1: One kind of snail (only one tested) responds strongly even if it only detects smashed up brethren (no crabs around).

I'm only a little sorry if the graphic nature of this offends you.  Nature doesn't
really worry itself about your childhood memories.  Nature is for real.

Act II, Scene 2: But that snail also does respond to the native crab even when no bretheren are involved.

INTERMISSION

(to soothe the crying kiddos)

Act 3: Neither kind of snail responds less when there are more live brethren around to share the risk (see post on the ecology of awesomeness for more detail on why this matters).

Nothing like killing off the most cherished Christmas symbol to put you in the Holiday spirit!  I'm evidently feeling punchy today. 

Speaking of punchy, I wanted to title this paper, "More than Meets the Claw: Behavioral plasticity... blah blah blah".  I thought this was  a clever reference to the fact that without actually eating the snails, crabs can change the ecological dynamics in the system (more oysters, yay!), and to a popular 80's cartoon.  Academia has a different take on clever, so I went with a more direct title (*cough, cough, SELLOUT!*).  

In all seriousness, I am much indebted to my former advisor and co-author, Ben Miner for telling me to stick to my guns as long as was reasonable and then maybe figure out how to be flexible and take recommendations from the reviewers.  I joke when I say this publication came from Santa, I made this happen with the quixotic tenacity peculiar to junior graduate students.  This was not an easy process, and took about 18 months from the time of first submission.  I would have given up waaaay sooner if not for Ben, or maybe just submitted it to Veliger.  


First: Oecologia, then: THE WORLD!

Wishing y'all happy holidaysmas2011!

Scientistas of the World: Part I OR Daydreams of a Graduate Student

So, my brother sent me some homework (thanks, man).  Today is evidently Ada Lovelace Day, on which day, we are encouraged to write something public about a woman in a STEM career (science, techmology, engineering, and math, or maths if, like the site, you're British)  who has provided us with some amount of inspriation or role-model-ship-ness-itude.  I'm not thrilled about having "homework", but without even meaning to think about it, two scientistas (I thought I was being cute and trendy using the -ista, but evidently that's actually the Italian word for a lady scientist, foiled again by romance languages) just popped into my head, and talking about their work would provide a framework for things rad and radula alike!

Part I: 

Nancy Schoeppner & The Ecology of Awesomeness

I sure don't know Nancy Schoeppner at all.  She really flies under the internet radar, this is literally the only actual information I could find on her.  I only paper-know her, as in I've read a handful of what I'm guessing is her PhD research with Rick Relyea at the University of Pittsburgh.  But, in addition to be an EXCELLENT science communicator (I totally heart reading her papers!) and experimental biologist, her work has really shaped some of my, hitherto undescribed, thinking about how prey decide whether or not to be terrified.  There are various names for this sub-discipline of Ecology: Risk-Assessment, Inducible Defenses, the Ecology of Fear (Mwahhahahahaha! It is October after all).  

The quick and dirty is this: Hark back unto my first blog post where I described the terror of being an oysters and knowing a predatory snail was coming for you, grinding a hole into your shell, hell-bent on suckingyourgutsout!  In that moment, that oyster can't really do anything about the snail, except hope he gets distracted by a pretty lady snail on an adjacent oyster and forgets about his hunger on his libidinous quest to pass his genes on (somewhat like terrestrial snails).  But some organisms can tell when they're in danger and do something about it - even plants, I kid you not!  Certain organisms can grow helmets and put spikes on their necks to make it harder for predators to eat them (so goth!), they can try to grow faster so that they get too big to be eaten by predators, or, well, they can run away and hide.  These are called inducible defenses.  Trying to figure out how these guys tell when they're in danger is, it turns out, really fun [for Emily].

Nancy's work has tested a bunch of hypotheses about risk assessment, and I think they are applicable to human decision-making in times of potential threat by carnivorous preadators (i.e., zombies, flesh-eating bacteria, Orca: the Killer Whale, etc.).  So here is Nancy Schoeppner's:  

3 Risk-Assessment Rules to Live and Die By

1.  If you can smell your family being eaten, there's a pretty good chance you also are in danger of being eaten, and you should do something about it.  

If you can smell your friends being eaten, there's still a good chance you're in danger, but maybe don't freak out so much.  If all you can smell is some folks you don't even really know and have never met and who have a totally different diet and culture from you getting eaten - no biggie! It's not really your problem, becuase those other prey (suckers!) are so unlike you, the predator probably doesn't even recognize you as potential food!  (NB: It's possible that this rule also guides US cultural attitudes and policy decisions)

2.  If there is a large cost to defending yourself, you should def. wait until you have good information that there is a serious, serious risk.  

Tadpoles in Schoeppner's experiments only changed their growth patterns (very pricey, energetically, and also non-reversible, so they're screwed with their permanent giant tails if they're wrong!) when they smelled predators consuming AND digesting friends/family, but they changed their behavior (who cares?! You can just come out from your hiding space when you realize your friends were punking you, and all you lose is your dignity!) in response to less threatening smells.  

3.  Do the math, dummy. 

If there's only one shark in the water (Fig. 1) but 500 tasty fat people, simmer down!  Probably that shark will rip off somebody else's leg (phew!) and then realize humans taste like diet soda and a bitterness that can only be acquired from a lifetime of regrets.  If the shark attacks randomly, the probability you will lose your leg is 1 in 500.  But if you all panic, you miss valuable wave time, and increase the probability that you will get crushed by the 499 panicking morons on their way to shore.  If, however, there are 499 sharks, and 500 people, the probability that you will leave the beach with all 4 limbs is 1 in 500, and so taking the chance of getting stampeded by your fellow prey is probably still a safe bet.

Fig. 1 Do not run from this shark - it probably won't rip your 

leg off because, no offense meant, but it would probably rather 

eat a brownie sundae. I put this picture in here because this post
is long and boring.

There are most certainly more rules, but these are the best supported.  I hope to add my own rules some day.  For instance, if you're on vacation, how can you tell whether that Italian man is ogling you because he's hungry, or because he likes the cut of your minigonna?  Are there threat-signals that transcend international boundaries?

My point is that plants and animals seem to be very good at telling when they are safe and when they should hit the deck, and can optimize these situations to make sure that they will live long enough to make many, many babies.  Even cooler, they do this all without actuarial tables, the Central Intelligence Agency, night-vision goggles (well some of them do have pretty good night vision), or even very sophistocated sensory systems.  I have really benefitted from Nancy's clear thinking and writing, and her thorough experimental technique - Swoon.  I'd love to write a review paper with her some day - but these are merely the silly daydreams of a graduate student putting off other work...

Nancy Schoeppner - Selected Publications (in no detectible order):
1. Schoeppner & Relyea (2008) Oecologia. Detecting small environmental differences: risk-response curves for predator-induced behavior and morphology. 154:743-754.
2. Schoeppner & Relyea (2009) Functional Ecology. Interpreting the smells of predation: how alarm cues and kairomones induce different prey defences. 23: 1114-1121.
3. Schoeppner & Relyea (2009) Copeia. When Should Prey Respond to Consumed Heterospecifics? Testing Hypotheses of Perceived Risk. 1: 190-194
4. Schoeppner & Relyea (2005) Ecology Letters. Damage, digestion, and defence: the roles of alarm cues and kairomones for inducing prey defences. 8:505-512.

"Death by radula" OR "An introduction to predatory snails of the PNW"

Urosalpinx cinerea having their way with a Crassostrea gigas

One of the things I really enjoy about what I do is getting to talk about killer snails.  Those of us who garden are, of course, lamentably familiar with the destruction wreaked by terrestrial snails and slugs.  But, by and large, the majority of the (non-marine) folks who ask about my research are surprised to learn that snails can be voracious predators of flesh.  My favorite part of this exchange is always watching how people react to a description of death by radula, which, even without the, shall we say, vibrant descriptors and pantomime I typically provide, is actually pretty graphic.  

In the most antiseptic terms, death by radula goes as follows: Snails (and many other Mollusks) have a chitinous feeding structure called a radula, something like a tongue covered with very hard teeth that is adapted to their particular diet.  Predatory snails use this as a drilling structure.  They secrete an acid to soften the calcareous shell of bivalves, barnacles, and yes, their friends if need be, and scrape away softened shell with their radulas, until they have pierced the shell (see below). This has earned the snail depicted above the fitting common name of Oyster Drill. 

Oyster drill (Ocinebrina inornata) hole in Crassostrea gigas shell.

Then they suckouttheguts! 

There are of course, other feeding strategies for predatory snails (see the Conus genus hunt...and be astounded! Moon snails cannibalize their buddies by smothering them!  Come at me, bro!). But my point is this: reactions to this imagery can typically be categorized as either grossed out, or fired up.  No one is completely unmoved by the thought of being an oyster in your lil' shell and knowing, even limited by your relatively undeveloped nervous system, that there is a snail drilling into your shell WITH ACID, and that it will SUCK YOUR GUTS OUT when it gets through.  And there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT.  

The fired up among us are my kindred spirits.  This blog aims to be a celebration of the little gems of insight on the natural world that get us all fired up, the moments of enlightenment that change the way we look at the world around us, and make us grateful that we are not oysters.

Rah Rah Radula