giant snail breeding for size

[alan2here]

Giant African Land Snails are really big for snails, and make great pets. I was wondering however especially given how easy they are to look after and breed if breeding for traits such as extra size has been tried?

Edited July 11, 2011 by alan2here

[Genecks]

Snails are pretty simple to care for. I suspect there is a colonization paper on them somewhere.

Your major issue would be housing space.

[alan2here]

It seems like others must have tried this already. Maybe it takes thousands of generations to create a signifegent difference and it's being done right now.

[Genecks]

It seems like others must have tried this already. Maybe it takes thousands of generations to create a signifegent difference and it's being done right now.

 

I believe people haven't been extremely interested in sequencing a genome of that snail. However, there is published information on snail development.

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10074/

The Early Development of Snails

- Gilbert

 

With that in mind, perhaps a large expansion in the knowledge of snail development could help you generate the large snails you desire. However, I think it would be unrealistic if not difficult to do yourself in a single human generation. Furthermore, snails take a while to breed.

 

With that said, it would definitely be useful to sequence the genomes of large snails and molluscs for better examination of their neurobiology, since snails tend to have very large neurons that are useful for electrophysiology research. However, it would appear that people are more interested in lamprey because they have a type of spine unlike the invertebrate snail.

Edited July 28, 2011 by Genecks

[alan2here]

thanks

[Moontanman]

Giant African Land Snails are really big for snails, and make great pets. I was wondering however especially given how easy they are to look after and breed if breeding for traits such as extra size has been tried?

 

 

I'm not sure if it has been tried but it shouldn't be difficult to do, we have already done the opposite in wild populations of everything from fish to mammals. We have also reversed the process in wild populations and resulted in larger animals instead of smaller. all you have to do to make individuals in populations smaller is to eliminate the larger animals regularly. This is done routinely in wild fish populations by requiring that only larger sized fish can be harvested and smaller fish are thrown back. This results in smaller fish breeding and larger fish not being able to breed because they are dead, over all, the size of individuals decreases. The opposite effect can be seen by only taking smaller fish and leaving larger sized fish, this results in the over all size of individuals in a given population being larger, if you slowly increase the size of individuals allowed to be taken while still taking small individuals then the over all size of individuals will increase.

[Genecks]

In a lot of ways snails take care of themselves. So, yeah, you can attempt to create larger generations of snails. However, I would suggest having a very large sample of snails in order to pick those who grow the most. That way you save a lot of time. Again, space becomes a factor. You'll need to house all of those snails and buy tanks, and make sure they are clean, and so on.