that hatch only once in every 17 years,
not only do they eat anything green that is in their path they are also eating through plaster in the walls of buildings as they attempt to consume the huge amounts of calcium they need to grow their shells, worse still I guess is that in Caribbean countries, where the snails have become a major problem, they have even been known to pose a hazard to vehicles by causing blowouts of tyres, gardeners have also been injured as the animals have been turned into dangerous projectiles by lawn mowers, not to mention that they also are known to carry a type of parasite called the rat lung worm which can infect humans through contaminated water or vegetables,
the origin of the out break remains a mystery, but one possibility mentioned in the article is a Miami Santeria group, a religion with West African and Caribbean roots, which was found in 2010 to be using the large snails in its rituals, the last known Florida invasion of the giant mollusc's occurred in 1966, when a boy returning to Miami from a vacation in Hawaii brought back three of them, possibly in his jacket pockets, after his grandmother released the snails into her garden, the state had to spend $1m (£650,000) and 10 years eradicating them,
in any event something will happen soon, because the snails are due to start emerging from underground hibernation at the start of the state's rainy season in just seven weeks, a typical snail can produce about 1,200 eggs a year, I wonder if there is a natural predator where the snails originate from to keep them in check?
2 comments:
The natural predator of the Giant African Land Snail is... Africans who eat them.
Dear Paul, I did not realize that they were edible, perhaps they can be eaten locally or maybe canned and shipped throughout the States, who knows they could be the start of a new export business? best regards, Stan and Diana.
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