Snails have teeth. Not one or two, but about 40,000 teeth.
For John Stanisic aka The Snail Whisperer, this snail fact is one of his all-time favourites.
"Our native species in Australia have between 30,000 to 40,000 teeth," Dr Stanisic said.
"Snails have a ribbon of teeth called the radular and there are many rows in the radular with up to 200 teeth wide and 400 rows long.
"The teeth are extremely tiny so there's no worry about being eaten by a snail."
Dr Stanisic is an honorary research fellow at the Queensland Museum and is Australia's foremost expert on land snails.
His life's mission is to get everyone to love snails.
Becoming The Snail Whisperer
Many people think Dr Stanisic's nickname came from talking softly to snails, but it originated from his ability to predict a snail's next move.
"I'm often asked if I whisper to the snails when I'm out in the field and I really don't. Usually I'm screaming, 'Where the bloody hell are you?'" he said.
"It's quite remarkable how snails … tend to gravitate to that same little rock pile you've checked before. You might search 10 rock piles and find nothing and then in one rock pile you'll find all of them at once."
After starting his career in the world of sponges and crustaceans at the Australian Museum, he then volunteered to help on a land snail collection and has never looked back.
"I didn't know my snails from my onions when I began," he said.
"But what I love about snails was that you don't have to get the live specimen unless you really need it, you can collect the dead shells which hang around in the environment for ages after the snail has actually died."
After taking a position as the curator of molluscs at the Queensland Museum he ventured out on his first "snailing" expedition between Gympie and Rockhampton.
In those two weeks he had collected over 13,000 specimens.
"When I came back and sorted them there were about 130 species that I could identify," he said.
"But I could only put names to about 13 or 14 and I thought, 'What have I opened up here, a can of worms? Or a can of snails?'"
Spreading the snail gospel
Dr Stanisic's aim in life is to teach the story of snails to the masses.
"To me it is much more important than, say, doing research at this stage in my life," he said.
Along with giving lectures and sharing his love of snails online, Dr Stanisic and his wife Lorelle have visited numerous schools throughout the country.
"I feel like I'm a missionary spreading the snail gospel far and wide," he said.
"There's a preconceived idea of what snails are all about, and when people find them in their backyard they often see them as unpleasant things that they'd much rather step on then do anything else with.
"Once they start learning facts about snails and what they do for the environment, they get really interested."
What it takes to name a snail
When it comes to naming a new species of snails, Dr Stanisic has a formula.
"Sometimes we try and focus on traits like the shell so people can see them and note how it's different to other species," he said.
He has named some in honour of his relatives, including his grandchildren, while others are named after researchers, the location where the snail was found, or even celebrities.
"It makes it a bit fun especially when you have 400-odd species out there to name," Dr Stanisic said.
"We named a tree snail after Steve [Irwin] just after he passed away.
"One of my favourites though is the very speedy little slug that we named after Peter Brock because he had little GT stripes on the side of its head.
"It takes time to name a species, but snail work is slow at the best of times."
Travelling The Slime Trail
There's not much of eastern Australia that Dr Stanisic has not covered when it comes to finding snails, and he's fondly named it The Slime Trail.
"Often I tell people I have a traveller's guide to The Slime Trail," he said.
"I still have places I want to go and collect, as I haven't been to the Kimberley at all, and that's on the bucket list. Along with Lord Howe Island.
But as he looks towards retirement he is finding it harder to collect live snails to study.
"I don't know why, maybe I've become more affectionate about my snails," Dr Stanisic said.
"I just can't bring myself to drown them and then preserve them so I let them go in my little rainforest in my backyard which I call my 'snail retirement village'.
"Every time I go down there I turn something over, or if I'm sweeping the garden there's a snail there — happy and enjoying itself.
"Since most of their habitat has been destroyed I find that it's a consolation prize for them to live their lives out there in some really nice habitat."
With 400 species in his collections that are yet to be named and more than 2,500 boxes of specimens at his home waiting to be labelled, he is not sure if his retirement will be soon.
"There's still another lifetime of work to be done in the snail world," he said.
