Miller tested it out for me with a West Coast relative of the common periwinkle.
“The question is, is there something special about the action of humming that elicits a response from the snails, or is it merely the act of dislodging them and handling them that prompts them to come out and put their foot down?” wrote Luke Miller, a marine biologist at San Jose State University who has studied periwinkle behavior. Others say that humming or singing relaxes the mollusk.īut according to scientists, there’s little research to prove it, despite the trick’s prevalence in local culture and on the internet.
The vibration along your hand, she writes, will reach the snail and entice it to come out of its shell. Position your head as if you’re making eye contact with it. Hold your palm out flat and place the snail in your palm.
#SNAIL WITHOUT SHELL HOW TO#
The instructions are simple, according to Bonnie Thomas, a family counselor and native of Maine who described them in a book about how to get children outdoors. “Every kid on the beach would just sit there and hum and they’d come out,” said Molly Auclair, who grew up on the coast and works as an educator for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which runs a citizen science project that studies where periwinkles are found and other aspects of the mollusks. Why do people hum to snails? For some, it’s a childhood rite of passage. Periwinkles stick around all year, but summer is the best time to observe them. In tidal pools, the spiral-shelled gastropods are everywhere: In a single square foot, you can find them by the hundreds, maybe the thousands in the best habitats. The common periwinkle, a saltwater snail about the size and shape of a Hershey’s Kiss, clings to rocks and gobbles up algae and marsh grass along the Atlantic coast from the Bay of Fundy to New Jersey, as well as in Europe, where they originate. “If you are patient,” she said, “it works every time.” I learned about humming to snails from my sister, who learned about it from a student she was teaching in Freeport, Me. People who grew up in coastal New England know this trick: To coax a periwinkle snail out of its shell, hum to it.
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