The Atlantic
They lure their prey with the promise of sex and then kill them cold.
Paulo Oliveira / Alamy
The aptly named cone snail wears a house that resembles a Ben & Jerry’s receptacle, filled not with ice cream but with a squishy mollusk that sports an extendable, trunklike proboscis. The snails are superficially docile creatures, and can be painfully shy; sometimes they go weeks in a lab without taking a single bite of food, cringing at the slightest change in temperature, lighting, or human supervision. “These are not racing snails,” says Eric Schmidt, a biochemist at the University of Utah.