Crete boasts a large number of different snails -120 in all. About half of them are endemic, meaning they belong to species existing nowhere else but on Crete, while six are edible, meaning they end up in Cretan cooking pots.

Chondros, lianos barbarosos, chochlidaki, mourmouri and archontissa snails are basic ingredients of Cretan home cooking. Their Latin names, which allow scientists to cliassify them, are less apetizing. Who would think of eating Cantareus aspersus, Cantaneus aperus, Helix cincta, Helic nucula, Eobania nermiculata or Theba pisana pan-fried with olive oil or even char-grilled? Whatever name they go by, archaeological research has shown that the Cretans have persisted in eating the same species from Minoan times to the present day. However most of the island's edible snails are absent from the fossils of Crete, the Cyclades and the Eastern Mediterranean. This shows that the ancient inhabitants brought the snails they liked with them, in all likelihood from the western coasts of North Africa, where the same species live to this day.

Snails are part of the Cretan diet. But what do snails themselves eat? Some of them are herbivore. So much so, in fact, that they do damage to vegetable gardens and crops. But most are detritivores, meaning that they eat detritus -the remnants of decaying animals and plants. Rock-dwelling species mainly feed on lichens that grow on rock surfaces. There are also carnivores, which eat other snails, such as Poiretia dilatata.

Adapting to the climate conditions is of vital importance to the survival of snails. They spend Crete's dry, hot Mediterannean summer in summer dormancy (known as “diapause"), enclosed in their shells. They awake once more with the first rains of autumn, bestirring themselves immediately to feed, court and mate. By this adaptation, Cretan snails have solved the problem of the hot, dry Mediterannean summer. The species related to Cretan snails tha live in northern Greece known nothing of the prolonged siesta taken by their cousins in the south, since climate conditions there are different.

But why are there so many species in relation to area? The answer is that Crete is not a “normal” island but a compound of islands, each of which had its own different species and its own endemics.

Source: Natural History Museum of Crete