TikTok Thinks This Coffee Hack Could Save You From The Snail

The terms of the contract are crystal clear: You will immediately receive $10 million and the key to immortality upon signing. It sounds like an offer you couldn't dream of refusing, but there's a catch. As soon as that money hits your bank account, you will immediately be targeted by what is perhaps the world's most vicious and highly skilled assassin: a garden snail who is also immortal. Don't be fooled by its little shell, for behind those cute eyestalks lies the soul of an unstoppable killer, which will follow you for the rest of your centuries on Earth. With just one touch of The Snail's slimy body, you will drop to your knees in a terrible, agonizing death.

Introduced in 2014 by the popular YouTube channel Rooster Teeth, the would-you-rather dilemma of receiving vast wealth and immortality (at the cost of being hunted by an immortal snail) has taken the internet by storm. To thwart The Snail, some Reddit users have suggested comically elaborate plans that involve destroying the planet to putting the creature in a tiny jar. More recently, one TikTok user may have found another way to keep The Snail at bay: with coffee.

TikTok user Morgan Eckroth recently posted a video of her adding salt to her latte, which she jokes she's been doing for 18,000 years while hiding from The Snail. While you at first might not see the connection between salted coffee and killer snails, there's actually some practicality to the humorous video. According to BBC Science Focus, salt is incredibly dangerous to snails and slugs, as the mineral's natural dehydrating proprieties can draw water out of the creatures' skin. Snails and slugs require a high water content in their bodies to move and survive, so too much exposure to salt can kill them in a matter of minutes. Plus, researchers have found that snails can be killed with a 1% to 2% caffeine solution, though this is a much more caffeinated mixture than your average cup of joe, Nature reports.

So why add salt to your coffee? According to Perfect Daily Grind, salt helps bring out the natural sweetness of coffee. This process is caused by the salt suppressing our natural ability to taste the beverage's bitterness on our tongue, allowing us to instead detect more of the sweetness in our lattes or dark roasts. Whether or not Eckroth's TikTok hack would prevent The Snail from slithering up to your door, it should still make for a pretty good cup of coffee.