Tag: snail

Saving the Snail Kite

  • Environmental scientist Rachael Pierce and her team travel on airboats into the marshes around Lake Okeechobee. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

We’ve spent billions of dollars
just trying to partially restore
the Everglades in Florida. Now,
there’s a struggle to save a bird
there that’s close to extinction.
It’s a raptor called the snail kite.
It’s becoming one of the symbols
for saving the Everglades. Rebecca
Williams has more:

Transcript

We’ve spent billions of dollars
just trying to partially restore
the Everglades in Florida. Now,
there’s a struggle to save a bird
there that’s close to extinction.
It’s a raptor called the snail kite.
It’s becoming one of the symbols
for saving the Everglades. Rebecca
Williams has more:

The snail kite eats pretty much only one thing – a snail called the apple snail.

The apple snail’s been disappearing – partly because of people messing with water levels in the Everglades for farming and cities.

Scientist Rachael Pierce and her team have raised apple snails in the lab and let them go in a marsh at the edge of Lake Okeechobee. Now they need them to stick around and have babies.

“It’s unlikely the snail kites will come back here to this marsh because we haven’t released that many snails. But in the future when we scale this up we do hope to start seeing snail kites.”

The survival of the snail kite depends on this working. And, some people say, if the snail kite goes extinct, things won’t look good for the restoration of the Everglades.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Mud Snail Slimes Into Great Lakes

A foreign invasive species is spreading to new areas. It’s a snail that could spread in huge numbers and compete with fish for food. The GLRC’s Mike Simonson reports:

Transcript

A foreign invasive species is spreading to new areas. It’s a snail that could
spread in huge numbers and compete with fish for food. The GLRC’s Mike
Simonson reports:


The New Zealand Mudsnail has made its way to Lake Superior. It had already
been identified in Lake Ontario. These snails become dense on a river or lake
bottom. Minnesota Seagrant Aquatic Species expert Doug Jensen says it’s like
having half a million in the space of a bathtub. They can squeeze out bottom
dwelling organisms that fish eat. Jensen says native fish eat New Zealand
Mudsnails, but the fish don’t digest them:


“They can pass through the guts of fish and potentially waterfowl and then
survive that situation and then breed in a new location, where ever they’re
deposited. They reproduce asexually. They produce clones of themselves; they
don’t need a male to establish a new colony.”


The snails are the latest on a long list of invasive species that have likely been
carried in by foreign ships.


For the GLRC, I’m Mike Simonson.

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Crackdown on Giant Snails

Snails that can grow up to seven inches long have federal health officials cracking down on schools, pet shops and “pet swap meets” across the Midwest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Snails that can grow up to seven inches long have federal
health officials cracking down on schools, pet shops and ‘pet swap meets’
across the Midwest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Giant African Land Snails are a non-native species known to rapidly eat plants and
possibly spread disease. It’s illegal to possess the snails in the U.S. Federal and state
officials have seized more than 1000 of the snails from schools, pet shops and homes
in Wisconsin over the last few months.


Now, the warnings are going out across the region. David Robinson studies mollusks for
the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He says the snails are not likely to survive an upper
Midwest winter. But Robinson doesn’t want the snails getting into warmer states and
their farm fields.


“There is always a possibility of someone taking a snail down south… very often when
people get tired of a pet…and this applies to any kind of pet… very often the temptation is
to release it to the environment.”


So far, government officials are not levying fines against anyone for
possessing the giant snails, contending most people don’t know about
the potential risk.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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