Nine-Inch Snails | Hacker News Reader

Nine-Inch Snails

theatlantic.com

125 pointszdw69 comments

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/10/giant-african-sn...

I remember when those snails invaded bombay in the 80s. saw one or two, and then they were suddenly everywhere. it was amazing how fast it happened.

> The snails, which actually grow to about eight inches in length, but can stretch—if nothing else, for headline-writing purposes—to nine inches, have worried Florida authorities since 1969.

Delightfully self-aware.

The writer probably had to have a private moment when she realized she could use this title.

Awesome way to show you’re not an LLM, by the way.

There is also the band... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qQ1pomYzk

Small snails look cute but 8-inch snail sounds a bit scary. Also how do they avoid being eaten by predators if they are slow and vulnerable?

Also I recently saw small slugs which were crawling on the sidewalk along with worms who get to the surface after rain. I wonder what those slugs were planning to do given its middle of October and temperature is merely 10°C (50F)?

"but 8-inch snail sounds a bit scary"

Avoid Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

I've lived in Seattle for 12 years and have never seen a slug here let alone a large one. I have seen those sidewalk worms after the rain, though

Long time Vancouver, BC resident. My pre-school daughter would fill a pocket with 5 inch banana slugs. Delightful to discover later in the house.

You should see a lot of slugs if you go into the forest. They are out there!

Banana slugs are long but not particularly large. Also, you only rarely see them in cities

Some things eat them like opossum and foxes, but the snails spread bad parasites so animals might learn to avoid them.

They can fertilize themselves so you only need one. And they lay 1600 or so eggs a year in batches of around 200.

They are breeding machines.

These giant snails are actually also really cute

> Also how do they avoid being eaten by predators if they are slow and vulnerable?

They mostly don’t. They just breed fast enough to compensate.

> Also how do they avoid being eaten by predators if they are slow and vulnerable?

That's why they evolved shells.

My personal favourite parasite is the human botfly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatobia_hominis

This bastard is a fascinating one. I mean there are others, but this one is close to my heart.

I recommend reading accounts of traveling through the Amazon, like The Lost City of Z. The number of pests in rainforests that do horrifying things to the human body is astounding and the botflies are only one of them. Makes me thankful for modern conveniences like pure DEET.

I just searched that and it looks great! Will check it out, thank you.

> this one is close to my heart.

That sounds dangerous - you should probably see a doctor. ;)

Hahaha I knew someone would drop this pun.

The article only briefly mentions the horrors of rat lungworm, but if you live in a warm, tropical climate where this is prevalent (Hawaii, increasingly Florida) you really want to avoid it.

Apparently there is some evidence that people born in regions where it is more prevalent have some natural resistance.

The main way to get it is accidentally ingesting an infected slug on raw produce, like leafy greens.

Here's a podcast on this parasite, what's known about it and how to avoid it: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-daniel-and-kellys-extraor...

OT, but giant African snails love to eat colored paper, and since their body won't absorb the pigments, they'll produce colorful excrements which can be used as experimental material: https://dornob.com/bright-blue-snail-poo-excrement-used-to-m...

Experimental _art_ / crafting material.

I was going to suggest that you submit this and then noticed you already did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130262.

We should definitely have a thread about this! But we need to pace our giant snail threads :)

Generally we downweight follow-ups so as to avoid repetition [1, 2]. But once enough time has gone by for the hivemind caches to clear, what is old becomes new again. If you would be willing to email hn@ycombinator.com in, say, a couple months, we could invite a repost and put it in the SCP [3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Excellent headline and graphic

my whole existence is flan

Terrible Slime

The Inward Spiral

Closer (just give me a few hours to get there)

"I wanna fry you like an escargot. I want some dinner for my insides."

Came here for the NIN puns. Did not leave disappointed.

Happiness in slithering

Fragile, and further down the spiral, sounds like snail attributes all along. I recommend the mollusk by ween while we're on the subject.

I know people don't want to hear it, but when cooked correctly, wild-caught African land snails are actually delicious. They do take some work to scrub the foot pad, and you want to cook them for a long time to both soften them up, and obviously to ensure there's no parasites left. But in a Ghanaian spinach soup - amazing.

I say wild caught, because farmed snails are fed wilted lettuce, and taste like wilted, rotten lettuce.

Good flavor I can buy, but the last time I tried snails it was the texture that had me gagging.

To be honest most of us French only love it for the garlic butter we serve them with.

That's kind of why I don't really like french snails: it's mostly about the butter, and I don't find eating a chunk of butter to be a pleasant experience really! Give me garlic butter on bread any day instead

It's not the only way the french eat snails though, in the south it's eaten in a tomato sauce (catalan-style as they call it, so probs not just a french thing)

Americans eat lobster for the same reason. It was considered trash food until we discovered garlic butter.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=was+lobster+considered+peas...

I still consider it trash food. I have a firm policy of not eating any seafood that wears its skeleton on the outside.

French escargots are smaller. I can see how the texture would be off-putting in a snail that’s about ten times as big.

Whelks come to my mind. I like them with ton of mayonnaise but it’s hit or miss. When I get it out of its shell, if it’s take too much time to see it unfold completely, I know I won’t have a pleasant time. You never know what you’ll get with them. Snails are more predictable.

Yeah, it's like conch. If it's not cooked low and slow, it's like chewing a bicycle tire. It takes a good 2-3+ hours to do it right.

In the south of Spain we eat plenty of snails and they are delicious. Go to Cordoba in May (spring is snail season, in Sevilla and Huelva you'll also find them, but in Córdoba you even have kiosks that in season sell only that) and have some Caracoles with a beer. They're smaller than the French ones and are cooked in minty and gently spiced water. Perfect snack with a very cold beer. As a proper dish or tapa we also eat escargot-like ones (Cabrillas) in a spicy tomato sauce. Also delicious.

Once or twice I’ve enjoyed snails flushed/fed up on green herbs and parsley. They effectively come pre-seasoned. The ones I’ve encountered have been smallish.

I understood it to be more of a finishing feed than a long-term dietary commitment on the part of the snail farmer, but both places I attended have since gone out of business. So maybe the economics are in fact against it…

Gift link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/10/giant-african-sn...

I've put that in the toptext too. Thanks!

The first time I learned of these was from the movie "The Naked Prey" where the according to google search,

  • He [protagonist] finds a giant African land snail (Lissachatina fulica) crawling on a rock.
  • Starving and exhausted, he uses his knife to carve the large mollusk out of its shell and eats the snail meat raw.
  • After swallowing it, he comically picks a sharp thorn off a nearby bush to clean his teeth.

A FL county just north of Tampa has been dealing with GALS for a few years https://www.cityofnewportrichey.org/Departments/Public-Works...

My favourite band.

For everyone confused, read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Inch_Nails

Running in slime, my body's so slow, everyone else is way too fast.

I can't exchange this living shell, give me some salt, and turn me to jell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qQ1pomYzk

https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Nine_Inch_Snails

https://archive.is/CPsFp - to view without individually unchecking 1249 “legitimate interests in stalking you around the Hinterwebs” flags…

Topic itself aside, that is some fantastic writing. A joy to read and a genuine value proposition.

That is what journalism worth its paywall looks like.

We should get Trent Reznor's opinion on these.

I just imagine a field of giant snails approaching me at a glacial pace, all loudly singing "Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve." Nightmare fuel.

https://archive.ph/CPsFp

The salt river northeast of Phoenix has been infested with apple snails from central america - they get up to 6" or so. The forest service regularly runs events where people in kayaks and on paddle boards help clear that section of river of the clumps of eggs.

I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home; they're not much bigger than two meters!

> giant African land snails

Brings back memories of Africanized bees

Upvoted because of the title :)

paywall.

One of the world's most 1EET H4X0R5, who hasn't left his parents' basement in 10 years and is rumored to be the operator of 5chan, told me that you can use archive.is to circumvent most paywalls, including that of The Atlantic.

Or, and don't take my word for it, ask Abraham Lincoln, who told me to try "reader mode" in Firefox.

Or disable JS. I didn't know The Atlantic had a paywall.

Abraham Lincoln's recommendation didn't work for me, reader mode shows the abbreviated text.

In firefox? Strange, I just used it to read the full text of a piece about botched executions.

Yes. Was that with The Atlantic?

I see what I did there. I mistook the absence of the CSS grey bar, for the complete text of the article. That's on me. You are right, this does not render the entire content visible to me. Were I an AI I'd say something like "you're absolutely right" but I'm not, so I'm going to add a specious double dash -- and slink away.

(sorry. I really did think I was reading the entire piece. It looks like what I see is their occasional seeding of freemium content which is long form and from their back numbers)

Thank you for figuring it out. It is just one more probably necessary step along the long journey to me finally getting an Atlantic subscription. But like every journey, it is not about the destination but the friends we made along the way, as our mutual acquaintance Abraham Lincoln once famously said.

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