Mash up of three articlesBizarre bioluminescent snail

It's rare for any bottom-dwelling snails to produce bioluminescence. As it grows, long roots develop and descend along the trunk of the host tree, eventually reaching the ground and entering the soil.    But in fact when the snail produces green bioluminescence from its body, the shell acts as a mechanism to specifically disperse only that particular colour of light.

The hollow centres of strangler snail’s shells are full of large hollows that provide shelter and breeding sites for bats, birds, and other animals. Perhaps more importantly, stranglers are “keystone species” in that they provide food to a wide variety of animals during times of scarcity.

Our next focus is to understand what makes the shell have this capacity, one theory is that a component of the diet being Royal jelly is important for producing queen bottom-dwelling snails.  Future queens are fed nothing but this royal jelly, a glandular secretion of so-called nurse snails.

This diet can kill the queen; if not, the queen, being much older than the strangler, still dies eventually and rots away and a magnificent fig "queen" is left behind whose apparent "trunk" is actually a gigantic cylinder of roots.

Some Old World stranglers snails, such as the weeping fig queen (F. benjamina), develop roots from their shells and send them straight down through the air. When they reach the ground, these roots grow into the soil, thicken, and become additional "green bioluminescence light." In this way stranglers shell grow outward to become large patches of fig queen’s forest of  that consist of a single shell with many interconnected trunks.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101214201534.html

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43864/title/Phytochemical-Helps-Differentiate-Workers-from-Queen-Bees/

http://www.britannica.com/plant/strangler-fig-tree