Its ALIVE!

Ok, we are definitely over the recent bout of frigid weather here on the Bayou.  Today the temperature soared to seventy degrees and with that I needed to be outside!  One of the chores that needed tending was to clean the birdbath.  I had noticed during the cold that the water, although frozen solid, had a brownish color.  I figured since I would not like to drink that then my bird friends should not be expected to like it either. During the duration of the freeze, I had placed a pan of fresh water out each day for their partaking but now I could go back to filling the bath.  While the water was one big chunk of ice, I noticed several snails caught up in the middle.  Obviously, they were in the birdbath and forgot to find a safer place when the temperature dropped into the teens.  Poor little guys!  Yep, I felt sorry for a snail!

A couple of days after the inclement weather spurt, that ice started to melt.  Lo and behold!  Those snails were not dead!  As soon as they were free from the ice, those rascals took to munching the algae growing in the bath!  Land sake's alive!  Who would have ever guessed that?  Not me.  I watched as those two acted as if nothing at all had happened to them.  Keep munching, little snails, keep munching!

The ability of the tiny snail to withstand such conditions intrigued me.  How in the world did something that is mostly water survive being frozen solid?  I picked up one of the snails and looked for any signs of trauma but found nary a blemish....or at least what might look like a blemish on a slimy critter.  I would have thought that the snail would have burst like a capped water bottle placed in the freezer.  Sometimes nature has it together.  Perhaps we should do a bit more observing of things in nature.  We might just come across something quite useful.  If scientists could harness the idea of what keeps these snails from freezing, the world might benefit greatly.  Just a thought after coming out of a deep freeze that gripped most of the nation.