Party Food... Snail Sandwiches
You will need:
* Cherry tomatoes
* Carrot sticks
* Celery
* Cocktail sticks
* Brown and white thin sliced bread
* Butter or margarine
* Variety of fillings
e.g. mashed egg with butter or margarine
* Tuna and mayonnaise
* Jam
* Cheese spread
* Marmite
* Ham
* Cress
What to do:
1. Make up the sandwiches as required and cut off the crusts.
2. Roll the sandwiches up like a Swiss roll and cut them into slices.
3. Arrange sticks of celery and carrots on a plate and fix a pinwheel sandwich onto them using a cocktail stick.
4. Place a cherry tomato for a head.
5. Scatter cress around the ‘snails’.
Snails are hermaphrodites which means they are both male and female. They lay eggs. You can tell a slug trail from a snail trail by the fact that a slug’s trail is continuous where a snail’s trail is broken.
A snail's body is characterized by a division in a soft body and a hard shell. In contrary to that of other molluscs, the snails' shell is asymmetric, as it is coiled to one side, either left or right.
The snail's musculous foot is it's main locomotive organ. The foot is almost all of the snail's soft body visible outside the shell. On the foot's sole side there are mucus glands that produce the slime snails crawl on. The snail's slime trace reduces the friction between its foot sole and the ground. Snail's slime also is used as protection against smaller enemies. The snail moves by making undulating movements of the foot sole.
Researchers believe that the properties of the slime of giant African land snails might prove useful in the treatment of bone fractures. This slime contains unusual crystals of calcite – a commonly occurring mineral.
