Animal Info -> Photo Gallery 5

Snail - a beauty

Snail is the member of the invertebrates and belongs to the class Gastropoda in the classification of animals group. It is an animal that has no limbs for locomotion. The snail crawls with his whole body in the ground. The scientific classification of the snail is as follows:

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Phylum: Mollusca
• Class: Gastropoda
• Order: Stylommatophora

Pulmonata group snails breathe though lungs and paraphyletic group snails respire through gills. In the world of animals these snails that have lungs are found in freshwater and snails with gills are found in land.

Snails are classified into fresh water snail, sea snail, and land snail. The life span depends on the species. In the animal world achatinidae has a life span of 5 to 7 years; helix snail has a life span of 2 to 3 years and the aquatic apple snail live for a year. If imprisoned some species of the snail can live for more than 10 years and there are times they have lived up to 30 years.

Mostly snails are found to be herbivores but the marine ones are either omnivores or carnivores. Snails have their habitats in the ditches, deserts and in the depth of the sea. Only the terrestrial snails are more familiar to the people but they are few in a number. But the sea snails occupy a large diversity in the animal world.

Turtle

• Phylum: Chordata
• Class: Reptilia
• Order: Testudines

The oldest member of the animal world is the turtle. Turtles belong to the reptile class since the body temperature of the turtles depends of the environment in which they are living (cold blooded). They belong to the order testudines which include dinosaurs. They can be classified into salt water turtle and fresh water turtle. On the whole the turtles living in the world are divided into 250 species and in turn these species are divided into 12 families. These reptile groups have their body covered with a hard bony shell.

Turtles are vertebrates that have exoskeleton. The shell of the turtle is called as exoskeleton since it is outside the body. The backbone and the ribs of the turtle are fused with the shell. The upper of the shell is arched and is called carapace while the lower part is flat known as plastron. The plastron helps to sexually identify the turtles. The plastrons of the male are concave while the females have flat ones. The shell can be hard and soft or big and small. Turtles are toothless but they have a strong beak to eat their prey.

The turtles may be herbivorous, omnivorous and carnivorous. It is the structure of the jaw that tells eating habit of the turtle. Some turtles change their eating habit as they grow. Since loggerhead jaws are used for crushing and grinding while the leatherback jaws are used for damaging all the things.