Animal of the year
The love game of hermaphrodites: The grove snail is animal of the year 2025
Pro Natura has chosen the grove snail as the animal of this year. It is inconspicuous, but of great importance for our soil and nature. And not a pest.
The grove snail has been named Animal of the Year 2025 by Pro Natura. The two-sex grove snails caress each other extensively before exchanging seed packets.
Image: Sylvain Montagner/Pro Natura
The newly crowned animal of the year 2025 is not a TGV: the grove snail travels at just 35 centimeters per hour, so it takes almost an hour to cover one meter.
Pro Natura’s choice is not spectacular, at least as far as the animal’s speed is concerned. It is little noticed but widespread. The Hain snail is at home everywhere in Switzerland. It inhabits different habitats, from sparse forests to diverse agricultural land to natural gardens. The snail is not drawn to the mountains; above 900 meters above sea level it no longer feels comfortable.
The grove snail was chosen because it is a soil maker. It uses its rough rasping tongue to pick up dead or wilted plant parts, fungi, mosses and occasionally carrion. This makes it part of the enormous variety of living beings that break down organic material and add it to the soil.
With a shell diameter of around 2.5 centimeters, the grove snails are among the larger of the 254 native snail species. Your pretty, right-handed house has up to five dark bands and varies in color from creamy white to pastel red.
A lot is hidden in the snail shell
It is difficult to distinguish from the very similar garden snail. Most likely at the case mouth and navel. They are always dark colored in the grove snail. Of course, the animal of the year 2025 will also retreat into its shell. A place to retreat is not only needed when it is dry or cold. The calcareous shell also contains the animal’s heart, liver, lungs, stomach and kidney.
The grove snail is slow, but moves forward on a muscular foot, always gliding on the slime carpet it produces itself. It can even crawl over knife edges without being damaged.
Hours of caresses
In winter it retreats into its shell for longer and falls into hibernation. This is over when the mating season comes. In spring or autumn the grove snails put on an amazing spectacle. The snail is a hermaphrodite, meaning it has two sexes. Before the hermaphrodite animals exchange sperm packets, they caress each other for hours, including stimulation with a love arrow made of lime.
This erotic spectacle turns into a few dozen eggs, which they later lay in a hole they dug in the ground. The tiny young snails hatch after three weeks. The grove snail becomes sexually mature at the age of three. In the wild it can live for around six years.
Unless it is killed by slug pellets. But the wrong animal is hit with these, because grove snails don’t eat the tender leaves of the young plants in the garden, but rather what is wilted and dead.
The species is currently not threatened. Pro Natura chose the snail as its representative because it is very important for biodiversity. The grove snail is not particularly demanding when it comes to its habitat. But it cannot survive without diversity in nature, in the garden and in the fields, which offer shelter, shaded areas and withered plant material.
