Environmental biomonitoring by snails

Background: Bio-indicator systems are vital in terms of monitoring of pollutants around the world. The impact of environmental change can be monitored by employing the responsive behaviour of snails. Heavy metal and organic pollutants affects snail reproduction, mortality, and normal metabolic activities. Various changes like a discontinuity in food intake, growth rate, twitching, and quenching of tentacles, are the biomarkers of the snails for biomonitoring. Different snails can bio-monitor eco-toxicological urban pollution, oil pollutant, terrestrial pollution, pesticide pollutants, mercury contamination, ammonia, chlorinated paraffin in soil, ethanol in water, ocean acidification pollutions. These animals can also make bio-sense about diverse environment spheres, which include the biosphere, lithosphere, anthroposphere, cryosphere, and hydrosphere.Methods: We examined the scientific literature and related articles listed in Pub-med, Google Scholar reporting on biomonitoring potential and biomarkers expression of various snail species and consequently explore the value of snails in the respective field by discussing various outcomes of a number of studies on the pollution biomonitoring and biosensing capabilities.Results: Several terrestrial, freshwater and sea snail species are characterized by the high sense of biomonitoring and biosensing potential. Various biomarkers such as expression of heat shock proteins and metallothioneins in the body are found to be the essential in-vivo biomarkers for pollution biomonitoring.Conclusion: It is observed that snails offer an environment friendly approach for the environmental bio monitoring by expressing their numerous physiological, biochemical, genetical and histological biomarkers in their body. Thus, it proved to be a critical bio monitoring tool and early warning indicators.