What did the snail say when it was riding on the tortoise’s back? Whee!
We’ve all heard the phrase “a snail’s pace,” but just how fast does a snail travel?
According to The World Almanac and Book of Facts, garden snails have a top speed of about .03 miles per hour.
However, in a championship snail race, called the Guinness Gastropod Championship, the snails were much slower. The course consisted of 13-inch track and the winner of the race was a snail named Archie, who made the trek in two minutes and 20 seconds.This comes out to 0.0053 miles per hour.
Why, if this was a championship race did the snails run so slow? Maybe snails just lack ambition when it comes to competition. Maybe they would move faster if they thought their lives were in danger.
But if a typical snail moves like Archie, they might cover a yard in 6.4 minutes and they could make a mile in slightly less than eight days.
So I guess if you have a pet snail, you don’t have to worry about building a fence. You can just put him on the ground and there’s a good chance he’ll be pretty close to where you left him when you come back — of course that assumes no one steps on him……
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