This has been a pretty rainy summer, and all the rain with the high temperatures that are normal for summer in Florida leads to algae growing on all sorts of things. The algae especially likes growing on wood and dead leaves. And along with algae comes the algae eating snails. Monday morning as I drove out of my gate, I saw this manatee tree snail (Drymaeus dormani) that had crawled part way down a pair of dead pine needles. It was obviously really too big to be there, but it had twisted it’s body around so that it could hang onto the needles. The shell, though, was pointed almost 90 degrees out of alignment with the body. It looked kind of comical, like a little snail contortionist.