Teh One Who Knocks
02-03-2014, 12:53 PM
By Robert Nolin, Sun Sentinel
http://i.imgur.com/9H5pxkT.jpg
As South Florida's foreign invaders go, the giant African land snail ranks pretty high on the yuckiness meter: They're not only slimy and smelly, they can also devastate crops, sicken humans and even gnaw the stucco off your home.
And the oversized, mucus-drenched mollusks are poised to move north from Miami-Dade County, where agriculture officials are preparing to unleash dogs in their two-year battle to wipe out the pest. The snail-detecting dogs will join a force of 50 snail hunters, along with a public awareness campaign, that is finally winning a grudging victory over the snails.
Their numbers may be slowly diminishing, but the snails' capacity for movement isn't.
"They're definitely knocking on the door up in Broward," said Omar Garcia, a Miami-based snail wrangler for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. "A lot of people are puzzled why we haven't discovered one there yet. It's something that we expect someday."
Originally from East Africa, mainly Nigeria, the snails can grow to 8 inches long by 4 inches wide and live up to 8 years. Their appetite for plants — they can gobble up to 500 species — is as prodigious as their appetite for each other. They start mating at six months and on average lay about 100 eggs a month. Hermaphrodites, they each bear male and female sex organs and use both simultaneously during intimate interludes.
How the gastropods — the name is Latin for "belly walker" — arrived here is another only-in-South Florida tale. Miami-Dade County homeowners began noticing the big slugs in 2011. Security officers also began noticing them at airports — they're illegal to import without permits.
Federal authorities theorized they were smuggled into the country by practitioners of Ifa Orisha, a Santeria-like African cult whose leader, Charles L. Stewart of Hialeah, urged congregants to drink the snail's juice.
"Religious practitioners from Nigeria have been known to use these snails in their religious practices," agriculture department spokesman Mark Fagan said. "They are used to foretell a practitioner's future health, prosperity and spirituality."
The health question was quickly answered: Those who sipped snail soup became violently ill.
In September 2011, the state mounted an all-out campaign to eliminate the snails. They endangered Florida's agriculture, which is the state's main industry after tourism. "We are a major producer of the nation's food supply," Fagan said.
The pesky snails also inflict structural damage: They will devour a home's plaster and stucco to replenish their large calcium shells.
In the campaign's early months, residents were the frontline foot soldiers, and their calls of snail sightings ran 10 to 20 a day. Armed with gloves and small rakes, teams of snail hunters answered each call to collect, catalog and dispose of the pesky mollusks. "We freeze them to death," Fagan said.
Two Labrador retrievers are now undergoing training at a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility in Georgia, and they will be deployed next spring to sniff out the snails, who have a distinct odor. "I cannot describe it; it's not a very pleasant smell," said Fagan.
Twenty-five neighborhoods in Miami-Dade have been designated as snail-infested, but officials have been setting out molluscicide poison that dehydrates and kills the invaders. Their death rate is now 85 to 95 percent, Fagan said.
But three infested neighborhoods are just south of Miramar, and the snails could be unwittingly carried across the county line.
"These snails could be hitchhiking on any number of items that could end up in Broward County," Fagan said. "We need you to be looking out for it. We need your eyes, but not your hands."
That's because the exotic mollusk carries a parasite in its mucus that can transmit a rare form of meningitis to those humans who touch it.
It works like this: Rats afflicted with rat lungworm can leave larval traces of the parasite that causes the disease in their feces. The giant African land snail, in yet another manifestation of its charm, eats those feces. The larvae become adults in the snail and emerge in the mucus upon which the snail "swims" on its belly.
The meningitis, which in humans causes swelling of the brain's lining, has no cure. The upside: It's rarely fatal.
The snail-detecting dogs are trained to avoid contact with their prey, and simply to alert to their presence.
A 4-year-old German shepherd that lived in an infested neighborhood in Kendall did not have that advantage. The snails are suspected of infecting the dog, which went deaf and blind after contracting meningitis and eventually had to be put down.
But victory over the invaders is within sight.
"Can we reach eradication? Absolutely," Fagan said. "It's a little too early to say exactly how long it's going to take. It could take a year, or two years."
http://i.imgur.com/9H5pxkT.jpg
As South Florida's foreign invaders go, the giant African land snail ranks pretty high on the yuckiness meter: They're not only slimy and smelly, they can also devastate crops, sicken humans and even gnaw the stucco off your home.
And the oversized, mucus-drenched mollusks are poised to move north from Miami-Dade County, where agriculture officials are preparing to unleash dogs in their two-year battle to wipe out the pest. The snail-detecting dogs will join a force of 50 snail hunters, along with a public awareness campaign, that is finally winning a grudging victory over the snails.
Their numbers may be slowly diminishing, but the snails' capacity for movement isn't.
"They're definitely knocking on the door up in Broward," said Omar Garcia, a Miami-based snail wrangler for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. "A lot of people are puzzled why we haven't discovered one there yet. It's something that we expect someday."
Originally from East Africa, mainly Nigeria, the snails can grow to 8 inches long by 4 inches wide and live up to 8 years. Their appetite for plants — they can gobble up to 500 species — is as prodigious as their appetite for each other. They start mating at six months and on average lay about 100 eggs a month. Hermaphrodites, they each bear male and female sex organs and use both simultaneously during intimate interludes.
How the gastropods — the name is Latin for "belly walker" — arrived here is another only-in-South Florida tale. Miami-Dade County homeowners began noticing the big slugs in 2011. Security officers also began noticing them at airports — they're illegal to import without permits.
Federal authorities theorized they were smuggled into the country by practitioners of Ifa Orisha, a Santeria-like African cult whose leader, Charles L. Stewart of Hialeah, urged congregants to drink the snail's juice.
"Religious practitioners from Nigeria have been known to use these snails in their religious practices," agriculture department spokesman Mark Fagan said. "They are used to foretell a practitioner's future health, prosperity and spirituality."
The health question was quickly answered: Those who sipped snail soup became violently ill.
In September 2011, the state mounted an all-out campaign to eliminate the snails. They endangered Florida's agriculture, which is the state's main industry after tourism. "We are a major producer of the nation's food supply," Fagan said.
The pesky snails also inflict structural damage: They will devour a home's plaster and stucco to replenish their large calcium shells.
In the campaign's early months, residents were the frontline foot soldiers, and their calls of snail sightings ran 10 to 20 a day. Armed with gloves and small rakes, teams of snail hunters answered each call to collect, catalog and dispose of the pesky mollusks. "We freeze them to death," Fagan said.
Two Labrador retrievers are now undergoing training at a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility in Georgia, and they will be deployed next spring to sniff out the snails, who have a distinct odor. "I cannot describe it; it's not a very pleasant smell," said Fagan.
Twenty-five neighborhoods in Miami-Dade have been designated as snail-infested, but officials have been setting out molluscicide poison that dehydrates and kills the invaders. Their death rate is now 85 to 95 percent, Fagan said.
But three infested neighborhoods are just south of Miramar, and the snails could be unwittingly carried across the county line.
"These snails could be hitchhiking on any number of items that could end up in Broward County," Fagan said. "We need you to be looking out for it. We need your eyes, but not your hands."
That's because the exotic mollusk carries a parasite in its mucus that can transmit a rare form of meningitis to those humans who touch it.
It works like this: Rats afflicted with rat lungworm can leave larval traces of the parasite that causes the disease in their feces. The giant African land snail, in yet another manifestation of its charm, eats those feces. The larvae become adults in the snail and emerge in the mucus upon which the snail "swims" on its belly.
The meningitis, which in humans causes swelling of the brain's lining, has no cure. The upside: It's rarely fatal.
The snail-detecting dogs are trained to avoid contact with their prey, and simply to alert to their presence.
A 4-year-old German shepherd that lived in an infested neighborhood in Kendall did not have that advantage. The snails are suspected of infecting the dog, which went deaf and blind after contracting meningitis and eventually had to be put down.
But victory over the invaders is within sight.
"Can we reach eradication? Absolutely," Fagan said. "It's a little too early to say exactly how long it's going to take. It could take a year, or two years."