Animal of the Year 2025 – Expert: “40 percent of snail species are threatened” – News

We are disgusted by them. It annoys us when they feast on salad. Children collect their houses. Now the snail is the animal of the year 2025. Of all things!

SRF News: You are a mollusk expert at the Natural History Museum in Bern. Four million houses and snails are stored here in the archive – including some specimens of the snail.

Estée Bochud: Snails are “the snails” that can be found in every hedge, forest or garden. It is one of the most colorful species we have in all of Europe. It has a spherical, smooth little house, around two and a half centimeters long, yellow, pink, beige or brownish. The cottage can be solid color or have up to five brownish bands.

Where do the different colors come from?

Protection against enemies is important: on a brown surface, a yellow house is conspicuous to predators. Brown specimens in particular have survived and reproduced there.

Brown houses, on the other hand, absorb more heat. Yellow houses are more common in open, warm areas.

Some of them live to be very old, Roman snails can live up to 20 years, snails can live up to six years, and they travel quite safely?

It’s a classic to show children how the snail runs over a razor blade. They are slow, but they do it well, because they have existed for 500 million years. What’s fascinating is that they never touch the ground as they produce slime to crawl on. This means they can pass through any surface.

Can they communicate with each other?

You can read their tracks. The snails use the slime to know whether their own species or another species has crawled through. This is important because there are also snails that eat others. The snails can also read the direction from the track. If they are threatened, they stay behind cover and hide in the bushes.

Anyone who has a garden is tempted to say that the fewer snails it has, the better…

40 percent of snail species are on the red list and are therefore threatened. If their habitat is disturbed, they cannot quickly move to another location. For example, there is a species that lives on a rock in the Simplon area. Now when people work there, this species has disappeared.

What’s missing when the snails are gone?

It is an important compost animal. The snail likes to eat dead plant material and brings the nutrients back into the soil through its droppings. The snails are an underrepresented group. Insects are the largest group, but the group of molluscs, including snails, is the second largest.

I’m glad that a snail is now the animal of the year, because it shows the connection to the soil: People always talk about the habitat being threatened, but the soil is usually forgotten. Two thirds of all species known worldwide live in the soil. And everything is based on the soil: all agriculture, every plant that grows.

The interview was conducted by Karoline Arn.