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Sticker of Malaysian trumpet snail
Bug card No. 0876 of 1,500

Malaysian trumpet snail

Melanoides tuberculata
Eats: PlantsSnails, slugs and wormsPonds, rivers and shoresNo legsNot an insect, but a bug cousin

The Malaysian trumpet snail is a small water snail with a long, pointy shell like a little ice cream cone. The shell is light brown with rusty red spots. It has a tiny lid that it can shut like a door when it hides inside.

Fun fact: this one is not an insect at all, it has no legs! But kids find it on every bug hunt, so it lives in Bug Wiki too.
Lives in
Northern Africa and southern Asia, and now many warm places around the world, in ponds, rivers and fish tanks
Length
2 to 3.6 cm (0.79 to 1.4 in)
the length of the shell
Top speed
about 0.03 km/h (0.02 mph)
On foot, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. It is a quiet little snail that only cleans up the bottom of the water.
What does it eat?
It scrapes up tiny green algae and bits of old plants and leftovers from the bottom of the water.
For real!Photo of Malaysian trumpet snail
Picture by Dennis L.. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Malaysian trumpet snail about 3.6 cm long (1.4 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)A crayon about 9 cm (3.5 in)A banana about 18 cm (7.1 in)
as long as 6 grains of rice in a rowneeds 2 minutes to cross a dinner table

How big is Malaysian trumpet snail compared to YOU?

Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.

How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

It likes to dig into the sand and mud and is busiest at night.

2

Most of these snails are mothers. They can have babies without any father at all.

3

The babies grow inside a pouch in the mother's body and come out as tiny snails, not as eggs. One mother can have more than 70 babies.

4

In some lakes its shell is very dark, so it can hide on the black rocks there.

5

It got carried around the world in fish tanks. In one river in Florida, people counted 10,000 of them on a single square metre.

you asked

Most asked questions about Malaysian trumpet snail

?What does a Malaysian trumpet snail eat?

Tiny algae and bits of old plants and leftovers. That is why fish tank owners often find it cleaning the sand.

?How big does a Malaysian trumpet snail get?

Its shell is usually 2 to 3.5 centimetres long. A few rare ones grow up to 8 centimetres.

?Is the Malaysian trumpet snail harmful?

Not to people. But where it was brought in by mistake, it can crowd out the snails that lived there before.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Melanoides tuberculata
Named by
O. F. Müller, 1774
Group
Snails, slugs and worms
Family
Thiaridae
Classification
Gastropoda > Thiaridae
Lives on
Africa, Asia, North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Oceania
Also known as
Red-rimmed melania, Malayan livebearing snail

Where the facts come from

  1. Red-rimmed melania (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by Dennis L.. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.

If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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