Violet Sea Snail

The violet sea snail has to be one of the wackiest ones out there! This type of marine snail floats on a hardened 'bubble' of mucus. The bubble floats at the surface of the water, with the snail attached below. It floats along with the currents, gathering up any edible debris that drifts by. It often eats jellyfish. The snail's shell is unusually thin, so that it can stay floating up near the surface. This snail starts out it's life as a male, and gradually changes into a female as it gets older. The young are born live, since the eggs develop internally, and the tiny baby snails build their own mucus rafts as soon as they are born. If the raft should ever break during the snail's lifetime, the unfortunate snail will sink to the bottom of the ocean and die.