EFFECT OF APPETITIVE FOOD ODOUR STIMULI ON THE GIANT AFRICAN LAND SNAIL Archachatina marginata

The study was carried out to determine the response of Archachatina marginata to appetitive food odour. We used multiple learning sessions of appetitive food-reward classical conditioning. The 120 snails were rewarded with the ingestion of unripe carrot as unconditioned stimuli (US) in 4 treatments of unpaired unripe fruit odour of carrot as conditioned stimuli (CS) in control treatment (T1); while paired with pawpaw (T2); combination of pawpaw andpear (T3); and pear (T4) respectively, each replicated 3 times, with 10 snails per treatment. Responses were measured through anterior tentacle lowering to sensory stimuli from CS. Resultsindicated that while pawpaw elicited highest feeding odour, T3 produced overshadowing effect with least (P<0.05)tentacle responses during conditioning.The A. marginata can learn olfactoryappetitivetasks and retain them in longterm memory for 12 days. The implicationof this study to heliciculture is that, snails learn that food odour is predictive sign which evokes response after conditioning;snails may only eat to satiation appetitive food which has a long-term memory trace.