Meeting Abstract
Across various modes of locomotion, body size and speed of locomotion are well correlated. Body size and crawling speed are also thought to be correlated in terrestrial snails and slugs, but existing data is ambiguous. We tested this hypothesis by examining the relationships between body size and crawling speed in the terrestrial snail Cornu aspersum. We also examined the relationships between wavelength and wave frequency on crawling speed. We recorded snails crawling on both horizontal and vertical surfaces. We did not find a correlation between foot length and speed. We found that there was a correlation between wave frequency and speed on vertical surfaces. Weight and shell length had no correlation with speed when snails were crawling horizontally, but we found a negative correlation when snails were crawling vertically. Interestingly, we found a positive correlation between wavelength and foot length for snails crawling on both vertical and horizontal surfaces. We also found a negative correlation between wave frequency and foot length for vertical crawling. These observations suggest that foot length does not predict crawling speed. There may be a trade-off between wavelength and frequency for snails crawling on vertical surface; as foot length and wavelength increase, wave frequency decreases and the overall crawling speed does not change.
