What you see here are baby snails laying on the metal blade of a carpenter's tape measure. The little snails are slightly more than an 1/8 inch in diameter. They are land snails.

A friend spotted the first one about 3 feet up on the rock facade of a building in Cape Girardeau. We found more on the edge of a concrete parking lot.

These little snails represent the smallest snails I have ever seen. Less than a keen observer, upon seeing them, would have considered them nothing more than grains of sand of flecks of dirt.

It is wise when observing nature to take time to look for small surprises. I cannot say precisely what kind of snails these are except that they are land snails. They will spend their lives eating microscopic algae, fungi and tender vegetation.