White-lipped snail
The white-lipped snail has a pretty striped shell, often yellow with up to five brown bands. Look at the opening of its shell: the edge is white, like a little white lip. That is how you can tell it from its brown-lipped cousin.

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Fun facts
Its shell can be yellow, pink or brown, with or without stripes. Scientists have studied these colours for a very long time.
It can live in colder and wetter places than its cousin, even in Iceland.
It has lived in North America for at least 7,850 years, long before the Vikings sailed there.
Its eggs are only 2 millimetres big.
It has been found high in the Swiss Alps, more than 2 kilometres up.
Most asked questions about White-lipped snail
?How do you tell a white-lipped snail from a brown-lipped snail?
Look at the edge of the shell opening. In the white-lipped snail it is usually white, in the brown-lipped snail brown.
?How big is a white-lipped snail?
Its shell is up to about 2 centimetres wide.
?Where does the white-lipped snail live?
In woods, dunes, meadows and gardens in Europe, and on the north-east coast of North America.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Cepaea hortensis
- Named by
- O. F. MΓΌller, 1774
- Group
- Snails, slugs and worms
- Family
- Helicidae
- Classification
- Gastropoda > Stylommatophora > Helicidae
- Lives on
- Europe, North America
- Also known as
- Garden banded snail
Where the facts come from
- White-lipped snail (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by AnemoneProjectors ( talk ). CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.