#turbinellidae

[coqsenstock]

Turbinella angulata - 255 mm, Bahamas

[delicatuscii-wasbella102]

Marine gastropods | Juliet's columbarium, Turbinellidae. East Africa, Mozambique

Marine gastropods | Mipus vicdani, Coralliophilidae. Philippines

[lavamollusks]

((OOC: This photograph was taken from the scientific paper Food of giants – field observations on the diet of Syrinx aruanus (Linnaeus, 1758) (Turbinellidae) the largest living gastropod.

These are the real teeth of syrinx aruanus, the world's largest snail.)

what do they eat

The gastrointestinal system of slugma is a truly fascinating thing.

To put it simply: Slugma primarily consume carbon and other minerals that can be found within and around magma streams, although this diet can be supplemented and replaced with certain organic materials that the slugma will use its heat to essentially carbonize and consume.

We tend to think of slugma and magcargo as soft, squishy things, which is misleading for a number of reasons. For one thing, their mouths are full of extremely small, sharp, and nearly diamond-hard teeth.

This is a dental x-ray of a year-old slugma. Unlike most pokemon, slugma don't have a jaw. These "teeth" (which appear to be primarily made of a compressed carbon-based material) fill the entirety of their mouth and are used to scrape the surface of whatever rock or other food source like sandpaper. If the food source isn't a rock, the slugma's body heat is high enough to convert most organic materials into a burnt-charcoal like substance that can be more easily absorbed into its digestive system.

I won't get into the nitty gritty of it all, but one very interesting benefit of this scraping feeding method is that it allows them to digest even the most fire-proof of fire types. Slugma aren't natural predators, but they are occasionally scavengers and they have occasionally been witnessed feeding on the carcasses of charizard and magmar.

As you might imagine, charizard and magmar are highly heat-resistant pokemon. But because of how we understand slugma's digestive tract to work, we know it needs to burn flesh to properly digest it. So that led to the question of... how are they doing that? Slugma are hot, but they aren't typically that hot, after all. Eventually the answer became clear: It's the scraping method. By removing the organic material in lots of incredibly small pieces, they were able to apply heat to exponentially more surface area than one otherwise might if they tried to, for example, cook a magmar in an oven. And because of that, they are able to char the meat enough for its largely mineral-based digestive system to absorb it.

[drhoz]

#1299 - Syrinx aruanus - Australian Trumpet eggs

Again, a species I’ve covered before, but you will hopefully be interested in the eggs as well, which wash up with some regularity after rough weather. The eggs are suitably enormous for the world’s largest snail, but trawling, anchor chains, and rough weather are all threats to their successful reproduction.

[coqsenstock]

Vasum armatum - 27/31 mm, Polynesia, Tuamotu

[coqsenstock]

Vasum rhinoceros - 72 mm, Tanzania, Zanzibar

[drhoz]

#1027 - Syrinx aruanus - Australian Trumpet

Another fragment, and judging by the erosion, it had been rolling around off the shore for some time. Still, with that size, hyperbolic geometry, and limited ornamentation, there’s only one thing it could be - an adolescent False Trumpet, the world’s largest living snail, up to 91 cm long. (Campanile giganteum got bigger).

Very young Syrinx look so different to the adults that they were originally described as a different species. The snails live in intertidal and shallow sandy areas in the warmer parts of Australia, Papua New Guinea, and eastern Indonesia, hunting for polycheate worms which they can prey on even if they retreat into their burrows.

Funnily enough, they can be quite common, in areas where they haven’t been fished out.

Leschenault Conservation Area, north of Bunbury

[coqsenstock]

Turbinella pyrum FREAK - 75 mm, India

[coqsenstock]

Turbinella pyrum - 105 mm, Inde