Fascinating article by Robbie Rae from Liverpool John Moores University in the independent news site The Conversation. In it he discussed his latest research that indicates snails use their shells as an active defense mechanism to kill parasitic nematodes.
But the part I found really interesting was how this singular bit of work brought up thoughts in him on everything from productization of nematodes for agriculture (NemaSlug), to the almost insane number of estimated nematode species in the world (100 million), to the possibility that nematodes trapped in snail shells over the past 120 million years could be use to track evolutionary changes in nematodes, to the mind-blowing possibility that parasitic nematodes are why shells exist on snails in the first place! Phew.