Cone Snails' Slime-sucking Siphons and "Comfort Rocks" (Patreon)

Hi Everyone:

My name is Elliott Kennerson, and I am one of the producers on Deep Look. 

I produced next week's episode, all about the deadly and beautiful cone snail! Cone snails have a pretty sweet arsenal of tools under their shells. They can nab their prey in microseconds, then slowly eat them alive.

Since we shoot for two days and the an episode only lasts 4 minutes, a lot doesn't make the final cut.

For instance, here’s a banded cone snail with his its recently harpooned prey - a smaller marine snail. When the smaller snail is dying it starts giving off tons of mucus...which the cone snail started slurping into its siphon. (Yuck!) The siphon isn't used for eating, it's used for smelling & tasting. So this snail is kind of just savoring the flavors of the meal it’s about to have. Escargot, I guess. 

We found out that making the snails comfortable was of paramount importance. They were really sensitive to vibrations in the room where we were filming. If we happened to walk by their tank with audible footsteps, or even laugh or talk too loudly, the snails would quickly retract their various organs out of harm's way. Which is not great for filming, of course. 

In one case the researcher, Joseph Schulz mentioned that we might have more success if we put the snail on its "comfort rock" (pictured above) as he called it. It was the rock where he usually placed the snail to feed it. And guess what, it came out of its shell after that (ha, but true). 

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