So there was this post on Reddit about a very very oversized snail.
The question posed was how fast this Bigger Boi would move, and the ensuing discussion swung back and forth between people mathing out an actual answer and people pontificating about how said Bigger Boi could not exist and would die.
Some people are just no fun at all.
Anyway, since this is kind of my area…I still did not respond to the OP because the post was already days old and I did not have any math to offer the math-focused sub. Also because I have a perfectly good blog to post things like this on where math is not really required. So here we go:
First, let’s have some stats about really big snails in real life:
The biggest Giant African Land Snail (GAS), Achatina achatina, is native to West Africa and can grow to almost a foot long and weigh up to 2 pounds. They have a weirdly puppy-cute look to them, are air breathers like us, and also like us can easily drown in water. GAS are mostly herbivorous but can transition to being carnivorous as they get older, consuming insects and other invertebrates (that includes other snails) or even carrion for protein, and they’ll also eat eggshells, bones, sand, rocks, and concrete to get the calcium that strengthens their shells. Their top land speed is around 6 mph/9.7 kph. GAS are hermaphroditic and lay eggs every few months – up to 500 at a time, although they’re said to max out at around 1200 eggs a year. They’re terribly invasive once you take them out of their native environment, something people frequently do because the puppy-cuteness factor makes them want to keep one as a pet. Outside of West Africa they pretty much have no natural predators,1Inside of West African, one of their predators are local humans, who like to eat them. so they’ll absolutely destroy native snail populations and local flora, not to mention food crops, both because of their voracious appetites and because they carry plant diseases. They also carry parasites like rat lungworm, which causes meningitis in humans.2If you don’t know what meningitis can do to humans…go watch some PSAs. GAS are illegal to bring into the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, while the UK and some European countries allow them as pets but prohibit releasing them into the wild.3I’m going to go with this being incredibly optimistic/idiotic on the UK’s part, because humans are notorious for ignoring these kind of rules.
Observations on the cartoon giant snail:
I’m putting our Bigger Boi (BB) at 80 to 100ft tall, going off his depicted height relative to the trees. BB probably can’t eat those trees, so he’s looking for food – and he will need literal tons of it. The concrete of the buildings is also going to appeal to him because he’d recognize it as a calcium source.4not that he actually knows what calcium is, of course Is he a danger to the people? Oh yes. Not because they couldn’t outrun him if they had the chance, but because they’d be thinking snail=slow and might not give themselves that chance. BB’s land speed may not be up to interstate highway levels, but his sheer size would mean he’s going to be covering a lot of ground when he does move and knocking over everything in his path. Not all of that is going to be crushed under his body, so you’d have debris collapsing all around him. Not to mention, his land speed would NOT correlate with how far and fast he could stretch out his ‘neck’ to grab something.5Most slow-seeming creatures are like this – sloths usually move slowly too until they suddenly *don’t* when they feel threatened. Did I mention that GAS have a special ‘tongue’ called a radula that’s basically a muscular ribbon covered with around 14,000 teeth? No? Well, they do. So if we scale it up by 100…welp, good luck with that, cartoon people. Because you’re standing there making snail jokes about a creature that could at any point snap out his 40-foot neck, open his cavernous mouth, and whip out an equally long prehensile-ish tongue covered with giant razor teeth that can ‘chew’ into just about anything.
Disappointment time! Why BB couldn’t exist in the World Full of Monsters universe
Because to get something big you have to mod it with something big – even a blue whale would not get you a 100ft tall land snail. Could mod science make a bigger than normal GAS? Kind of but not really, because whatever we mod the snail with is necessarily going to change the look of it in significant ways, so the result is not going to look exactly like a land snail. Increased size would also cause some problems with the amount of food it would require, which considering how voracious the regular-sized ones are could very quickly become a huge problem no matter whether someone was trying to feed it or it was foraging on its own.
So what if we mod something else with a GAS? Okay, if you’re going to use the snail as a tweak for another animal, what are you trying to accomplish? Because about the only physical trait this thing has that you might want to add to something else is the tongue, and there’s no conceivable reason to do that…unless you want your end result to be able to eat concrete. Which is probably taking us straight into Ancient Fire territory, to be honest, because there’d be no way to get just that trait into something with a DIY mod. And I’m not sure I want to know what a 50/50 with a GAS and literally anything else would look like, do you? Because I promise you, the end result would not be puppy-cute anymore.