Snails want to eat me, and now, sea urchins.

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Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2008 7:31 pm

It's not just snails tasting me anymore.

Short digression/explanation: I am a wacky hands-on treehugging look-that-snake's-so-cute animal lover. As in, I see something slimy with twenty legs crawling under my shoe, and I pick it up and say "Awesome!" and tell everyone in the immediate vicinity about the cool bug I just found. It's instinctual. It's a Pavlovian reaction. See animal = touch animal.

Back to the snails: they like to bite me.

Well, not really bite me. Snails don't have real teeth. What they have is a radula- a roughly textured tongue used to rasp away at food. Or rasp away at Chainys. Almost without fail, when I pick up a snail it confuses my fingers with food. This does not do anything, because snail radulas aren't exactly Weapons of Gastropodic Destruction, but then again, if snails were intelligent they would have realized that ChainYankers are not on the regular menu.

So I wasn't suprised when I went to an aquarium on Tuesday and got bitten by a giant sea slug. And when I say giant, I mean nearly the length of my forearm. The aquarium has a touch tank, and the touch tank had two of those things, gliding around looking freaky. I am not one to call any animal "freaky" lightly, but I think these guys earned it.

So I took being mistaken for Fish Munchies by a steroid-enhanced slug (with a radula to match) in stride. What I found rather unsettling was getting the same treatment from the sea urchins.

I didn't realize I was giving them the munchies at first. I touched a few urchins to see what would happen, and they tighten their spines around my finger. When I kept the finger in place for longer periods, they would latch onto me with their suction-cup tube feet.

After I had managed to disengage myself from the suckers, I asked an aquarium guy about the urchins.

"They act weird when I touch them. They wrap their spines arounf my finger", says I.

"They do that", says the aquarium man. "They're pushing you away."

"They are not pushing me away. They are holding on to me. Also, they are grabbing me with their suckers."

Aquarium Man is suprised. "They must like the taste of you then. They'll let go when they realize you're not food."

In the spirit of scientific stupidity, I went around poking every sea urchin I could find. All of them grabbed my hand. None of them let go without me physically prying myself away from the suckers.

I thought it was pretty funny that all these animals thought I was edible. Hah, it's not like they could eat me or anything. Then I remembered: Wednesday's activity involved getting in the cage with a tiger. Maybe it wasn't so funny after all...

Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2008 10:44 pm

H'm-the beasties seem to like Chain Sushi?I might try to limit my contact to species that are toothless,or have an oral orifice smaller than your finger.Does this general tastyness seem to extend to mammals?If so Chain,been nice seeing you here,the news story of your demise should be impressive.