Mystery Snail siphon appendage.

[Brumbleberry]

Did you know that mystery snails (Pomacea diffusa) can breathe air and they have gills for underwater respiration? It's kinda wild to see them use their freakishly long siphon appendage as they gulp air at the surface.

I shot a short video of the weird siphoning air behavior here.

I've got a 10g dirted and planted freshwater aquarium I house just invertebrates in. A few types of snails as well as ghost shrimp and red cherry shrimp.

 

[Arachnomaniac19]

Bettas can basically do the same thing.

 

[Brumbleberry]

Bettas can basically do the same thing.

Yeap, bettas can breathe air. But I think it's rad that this snail has both lung and gill organs separate from each other. I'm no expert, but here's some info from more expert sources: http://applesnail.net/content/anatomy/respiration.php

Yeah! Betta (and a few other kinds of fish) have this extra area on their gills called a labyrinth: http://www.aquariadise.com/what-is-the-labyrinth-organ/

What I guess I find most interesting about the snail anatomy (as far as I understand it) is that they posess both a gill that works like we'd imagine it to, with water passing over it, and a separate lung device to pull oxygen from the air. I found some info on this site in the 'respiration' tab. http://applesnail.net/

 

[Smokehound714]

bimodal respiration is pretty cool, true spiders do this too. they breathe with both book lungs and tracheae. It's what enables wolf spiders, lynx spiders, and jumping spiders remain so active and run around as opposed to mygalomorphs which spend long periods of time motionless.