Are these love bugs or not? 👀❤️ #snails #lovebugs #valentinesday #valentines #love #giantsnails

some of the most critically endangered animals on the planet I'm on my way to meet Simon one of our zookeepers here at har Zoo who's going to introduce me to one of our most special animals hey heycome how you doing buddy you're right good you're right good to see you good to see you and you coming to pay us a visit I am I'm here to find out all about these little guys ah excellent these are a Vietnamese Magnolia snails ah so are we quite lucky to have these love bugs here at the zoo more than lucky but let me just correct you there they're not bugs so what they are they're invertebrates and in fact they are among some of the largest snails on the planet they are six times larger than your average garden snails so which ones are boys and which ones are girls so these snails are what you call true hermaphrodites okay and what that means is they contain both sexual organs of male and female as well now what they will use is something called The Love Dart the love Dart the love dot is is pretty much like cal made up of calcium and this is how they impregnate themselves or each other in order for them to give birth to nice little baby Vietnamese Magnolia snails that's so cool that's so unique I love it so obviously these guys are amazing and you know it's quite incredible how critically endangered they are so they're very special but what is your number one favorite fact about them I would have to say my number one favorite fact is the copious amounts of mucus that they produce if they get stressed so if anything threatened them or they feel stress copious amount of yellowish kind of mucus they love all this like the leaf litter and in fact what they'll do is bury themselves in that leaf litter and that's where they feel most secure so hopefully no copious amounts of M I say yeah fingers crossed I can't see it at the moment so they're obviously very very comfortable absolutely but M that is amazing to hear all this about these beautiful snails so thank you so much for your time I'll leave you to I'll let you crack on brilliant no thanks thanks for coming in I'm glad you had a good look at him come back soon yes lovely well that was quite incredible and it just shows one of the many ways we are trying to fight Extinction here at half Shizu