Mark Ricketts, age 9, of Oxford, Georgia, for his question

Does a snail have teeth?

Mr. Snail likes to live a very quiet life in the garden. You don't often see the old slowpoke because most of the time he manages to stay hidden. But my, you can see what he does to your favorite plants. He dines on greenery    and he eats the tenderest young leaves he can find. He may eat a big hole in a leaf, or he may eat the whole thing and leave just the stubby stalk. Naturally you wonder whether he has teeth to bite and chew up all this greenery.

A snail has a most unusual body. He carries his eyes on top of two tall stalks and manages to get around without legs. The shell on his back is his house and he carries it with him all the time. He also has an unusual way of eating his food. For example, your teeth are set in two solid jaw bones. The snail's soft little body has no hard bones like yours. But he does have a jaw made of tough, horny material. And instead of teeth he has a very special tongue called a radula.

If you capture a snail; you can watch him feeding. He is, as you know; a shy creature and when you pick him up he pulls his entire body inside his shell. Handle him gently, because his shell may be quite fragile. Place him in a quiet box among a few shady leaves and sprinkle them with a few small drops of water. Also, place a piece of crisp lettuce where he can find it. A snail likes things cool, slightly moist and very quiet. But even with everything just right, you may have to wait a while before he feels safe enough to come out of his shell. Then watch him go for that lettuce.

Notice the four feelers, like stalks on his little head. Two of them are his eye stalks. The other two help him to select suitable food. He quickly decides that the lettuce will make a fine meal. Then he grabs a bite in his small mouth and starts eating. To do this, he uses he horny jaw on the roof of his mouth and that special radula tongue. Together, they tear off sizeable bites and chomp them into swallowable pieces.

The snail's radula is like a small moveable strip of ribbon. He can push it forward and backward inside his mouth. The special thing about it is the rough top. Actually it is covered with hundreds of tough little scrapers, neatly arranged in rows from side to side. The snail uses them instead of real teeth. When he moves his radula tongue back and forth across a leaf, it files and saws the greenery to shreds.

There are many thousands of different snails in the world. Only a few types live in gardens and feed on tender greenery. Some live in the seas and rivers. They feed on tougher water weeds and sometimes on scraps of decaying meat. A certain tree snail wears a handsome striped shell and chews even tougher food. He uses his radula tongue to eat the thick brown bark on the tree trunk.