Crawling at snail’s pace is perhaps a familiar term. While the snail’s pace is famous or infamous for its slow speed, one really wonders whether snails have legs.  For when one thinks of a snail, a picture of a snail’s legs do not come to one’s mind.

Well, the interesting part is that the whole of the bottom part of the snail is a foot. The snail may be classified as a mollusk. The body of most mollusks has three main regions: the head, the visceral mass and the foot. The foot is the bottom-most part.  

A snail’s foot is flat and smooth. It has tiny glands that secrete a slimy fluid. The snail uses the muscles in the foot to glide smoothly over the slimy surface. When it glides, the snail makes a wavelike movement. There are tentacles on the heads, which guide them by feeling the surface as they move. These tentacles help in sensing danger too.

The foot of the snail is so strong that even if it moves along the edge of a sharp razor, it won’t hurt itself. This is only one of the few amazing things that a snail can do. In fact, its body structure itself is a wonder. 

Basically snails are of two types. There are those that have shells and those that don’t.  The ones with the shell have a body that fits perfectly into the coil of the shell. With their strong muscles, the snail pulls its entire body into the shell when it senses danger. When the body is thus packed into the shell, the snail closes the opening of the shell tightly with the help of a horned disk.

Snails cannot get lost.  Wherever they wander, they are led back to their hiding place by a very sharp instinct. Interesting, right? Here’s more. The snail’s tongue is an in-built food processor.  It is shaped like a file with hundreds of tiny teeth. It uses the tongue to cut and shred the food that it eats. It's favorite foods are plants of different kinds.