We've got a vocab "argument" when it comes to the beauty industry. They say that super hydrating lotion has snail mucins. Scientists say mucins are in a protein family secreted by animals for a whole host of reasons. Come clean beauty industry! It's snail mucus.
Show Notes:
NIH National Library of Medicine: Super cool snail slime paper
NPR scientist interview
Snail Facial with REAL SNAILS!
Transcript:
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Junk. I'm Amy Barton.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Trace Kerr. And today is everything you never knew you wanted to know about Snail mucus.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Oh, I am delighted already.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: It's not just for sidewalks anymore.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Really? I hope there's some practical use, like this is a part of our perfume or, you know, that chapstick you just used. Okay, dazzle me with grossness, please.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: You're going to love this. Okay, so let's get into mucus first. Such a great word. What do you think of when I say mucus?
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Well, I have asthma, so I immediately think of I have to cough, so mucus is alarming to me It hits that first, not gross.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Okay. I always think of the frog in princess and the frog when somebody's like, it's slimy. The frog is slimy. And he's like, it's not slime, it's mucus.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Oh, that's entirely different. Fine. Wonderful.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Well, snails use mucus as a lot of things. They use it as a glue. They use it to make a slick non stick surface to glide on. And apparently it takes a lot of work to make a snail trail biologically.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Really? So mucus for snails is like the duct tape of the snail world.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah! Well, and I was reading this one paper, and they were saying like 10% of their energy goes into creating.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: That's a lot.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So slime scientist Antonio Cerullo from University of New York, comparative mucomic analysis of three functionally distinct cornu aspersum species. Say that three times fast.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: I would like to meet this person.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Well, you know what? There's an NPR four minute long thing where he's interviewed, so I'll have that in the show notes. He is delightful to listen to. So he is digging into the importance of snail secretions.
And so, fun fact, they gathered snail slime in a lot of different ways. So they went to a snail grower who grows them for, like, escargot, that kind of stuff. And they were like, would you mind if we scraped your snails?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: I really hope you're going to tell me that snail mucus is like sweat. And if they're nervous, you can tell from their mucus.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Oh, no. But they scrape them in different places. So you scrape the back of the snail, the top of that foot, and you get a protective mucus that does all sorts of interesting things. And then snail trail like that, they leave on the ground that has that slick slidy stuff that's going on. And then for the adhesive mucus, they take a petri dish, they stick the snail on it, and they flip it upside down. And then the snail is like, oh, I have to stick. And so it does its sticky stuff. And then the snail moves around on the upside down petri dish, and then they scrape that off, and that gets that third kind of mucus.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: I know! I'm imaginin...
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