Snails are herbaceous mollusks, meaning they have a diet including various vegetables and fruits, that have a great deal of climate needs. Their diets have exclusions, such as when different species of snails are housed together, becoming territorial, and eat each other. I will discuss their primary diet, and include side notes of what works for me.
As I said, snails tend to like veggies and fruit; they enjoy all kinds of foods, and you can feed a great many food-scraps to them with exceptions to things listed in the next segment. I tend to feed my snails homegrown lettuces, radish-leaves, and arugula; I’ve tried broccoli and zucchini with success; and I’ve read about snails eating and enjoying apple and starchy fruits, and some even like tomato.
I urge against attempting to feed snails any form of salt or sugar, as well as any garlic, onion, or citrus (including oranges and definitely not lemon). In small quantities these may not be lethal, but it is better to be careful. Another good to avoid is pasta, bread, and any other “expanding” grain. If snails eat pasta it will expand in their stomachs and result in death.
Personal Accounts: I have heard of handlers feeding radish leaves to their snails, and that they love it; however, my helix snails don’t particularly care for them. My snails tend to like lettuce the most, they’ll also destroy an arugula leaf in less than an hour, and they really love broccoli.
Snails need protein and calcium, like any other creature, but it seems that where their needs end for smaller land species like Helix Pomatia. The best investment for a snail enclosure is cuttlebone (pictured below), which is commonly found in the bird-section of most pet stores. In place of such a material, many handlers will use crushed eggshell (which is easiest to work with when you remove the membrane)
Personal Accounts: Before getting a cuttlefish bone I would crush eggshells (in a mortar and pestle, clean of chemicals and salts) into a fine powder and spread it on their food. I would also get a small dish and pour some eggshell in it and the snails would eat it right out of the container.
Snails are wet, slimy, cold mollusks. In their environments they prefer to have a moderate humidity - between 30% and 60%. For small tanks with no capability of a digger, or a larger tank with open space, moss can provide great humidity and give ample shelter. Their substrate (which I will delve into in a later post) shouldn’t be wet, due to molding, but it should be damp; you can get away with spritzing their tank twice a day with an average spray bottle. It’s also beneficial to provide them a very shallow dish with water (a good rule of thumb is 1/2-1/4 the height of your smallest guy, otherwise they can drown) - this will give them the resource to hydrate when needed. Change the water in the dish daily to give them fresh, pH balanced water.
Personal Accounts: Without sufficient humidity, your snails will deploy a firm membrane - called estivation, which is process snails undergo to protect themselves against dry climate and extreme temperatures - that attaches them to the wall of your tank. Do not pry them from this membrane, you may damage their shells, damage their bodies, or just generally upset them and make them unable to trust you. Instead, maintain a moderate temperature (around 50-65 degrees in Fahrenheit) and a moderate humidity, as shown above.
