Move faster on African snails

DURING a three-week pilot in Caroni and St George West, a bounty-hunting effort gathered 120,000 giant African snails. A mound of the pests weighed five metric tons.

The Ministry of Agriculture paid a $27,000 bounty to 52 snail hunters, the ministry's director of extension training, Teresa Rosemond told the Joint Select Committee on Land and Physical Infrastructure on January 22.

The snail, a pest with few local predators and a prolific, hermaphroditic reproduction cycle, has an appetite for decaying vegetation and every plant in its path.

The local slug-eating snake (sibon nebulatus) preys on the snail, but there are few such snakes in the urban environments where the snails are proliferating.

Floodwaters bring mud, vegetation, and the snails down to coastal city centres, where they find comfortable homes in garbage and cuttings.

Add to that mix a capacity to carry parasites, including rat lungworm – for which it is described as a "major reservoir"host"—that threaten people, and its growing abundance is a matter of concern.

The Health Ministry, responding to reports that the giant African snail was being suggested as a meal, issued a public warning on January 24 about the risk of eating inadequately cooked snails. The ministry noted that the creature's indiscriminate diet might expose it to unknown environmental toxins that cooking might not eliminate.

The giant African snail is a "notifiable pest" and the Agriculture Ministry requires citizens to report sightings of it.

There's a good reason for that.

Disposing of the snail is a multi-layered process involving more steps than an annoyed resident is likely to take.

The worst of all possible responses is to crush the snail under a shoe, which triggers an autonomic reflex that spills dozens of eggs everywhere.

That temporary satisfaction and considerable mess will probably lead to dozens of juveniles in short order.

The giant African snail needs only to mate once to produce fertile eggs and can lay up to 1,200 eggs per year. It lives for up to nine years and can begin reproducing within six months of hatching.

The Agriculture Ministry has published extensive documentation on how these snails should be trapped, baited, and destroyed. But only the most committed snail stalkers will follow these detailed instructions.

A wider test of the bounty system, with appropriate training and insistence on proper prophylactic equipment for snail collection, offers a promising response to the problem.

As a threat and an infestation, the snail is unlikely to be eradicated. However, efforts to limit its population and increase public education about the care necessary in handling them are merited, even for those who want to get rid of the snails to save their gardens and aren't interested in the bounty.