Through some hours of careful observation, I’ve come to the conclusion that snails are controlled by committee. There’s guys in charge of the foot / locomotion, there’s guys in charge of the mouth, guys in charge of the head, and so on. And each group communicates with each other through complicated forms that have to be filled out in triplicate.

So for instance, the team who work the lung and gills decide they want to inflate the lung with air, so they send some paperwork to the crew who are in charge of the snorkel. The snorkel crew get to work and raise the snorkel up but find out it’s still underwater. “Raise it more! Swish it around a bit!” but no-go. So they send the paperwork down to locomotion and request the foot get in gear and take them up to the surface. The foot starts up and the snail climbs the nearest thing. They get as high as they can go then shut down, sending a signal back to the snorkel guys. “Raise it up!” but no, still under water. There’s more confusion, the snail goes around in a circle, but the foot team insist they can’t get any higher. Now the snorkel team sends the paperwork off to the head to try and get the eyes or tentacles to let them know what the problem is. Meanwhile they overhear a message that the mouth has just sent to the stomach, saying that the food supply here isn’t so good, they can only find a live plant and no algae or rotting material. Someone figures out that this means the foot has climbed a plant and not the tank wall, so another message goes out. The snail starts up, and just goes in a straight line until it finds a vertical wall, then starts to climb.

Meanwhile the mouth crew finds some good stuff and asks the head to start swinging left and right, so the mouth can graze. At long last, the snorkel team finds air and the foot shuts down. The snorkel is deployed and then the lung crew take over, and the snail starts doing push-ups inside the shell, pumping air in and out. When its done the head and mouth send the request and the foot does the aboutface and they start down while the mouth goes back to grazing. Halfway down, the foot gets bored and decides to go parasnailing. The eyes send an emergency communique that there isn’t enough altitude and there’s no clear landing zone but it’s too late. The snail gracefully launches, glides down about 3 inches and does a header into a rock formation.

All the little boardrooms and control centres inside get shook about, the lights flicker and go out, and the lung team lose control of the machinery and the snail burps out the air bubbles it just worked so hard to find. Eventually the lights come back on and the various work crews get themselves sorted out. The lung team sends the forms to the snorkel crew saying they need air. The snorkel team can’t find any, even though they streched the snorkel as far as they could and even swished it around. So they send the paperwork down to the foot team, asking the snail to climb up to the surface…

p.s. This actually isn’t far from the truth. Snails don’t have a central brain, just a bunch of separate ganglia that control different areas — click here for actual science content. It’s unlikely that the ganglia communicate with forms filled in triplicate, but observation suggests they may use an early form of morse code.