The land snail, Achatina fulica, is one of the most destructive invasive species in a state home to dozens of destructive invasive species: it's massive, up to 10 inches long, eats just about any plant product it can find, devours stucco on houses, sometimes eats car tires, and can carry a parasite that's dangerous to humans.
It's difficult for the researchers to get across how awful these snails are; people seem to kind of like them, with their big eyes waving around on their eye-stalks. But they're significantly more damaging to the natural ecosystem than, say, the Burmese python, which also took hold in the swamps and cypress forests of South Florida. The snails breed wildly, producing 1,200 eggs per year, and have few natural enemies in Florida.
The scientists are attempting to figure out how the snails, native to East Africa, arrived in Florida. A previous infestation came from a boy who brought three of them in his pocket from Hawaii. His grandmother released them into her garden, where, seven years later, those three snails had turned into 17,000 snails.
One theory traces the snails back to one Charles L. Stewart, an African immigrant who was arrested for importing the snails back in 2010. He says he is a practitioner of Orisha, a sort of predecessor to the more familiar Santería, and that the snails are traditionally part of Orisha rituals. A witness said that Stewart would "hold [the snail] over the devotee, then cuts the [snail] and pours the raw fluid directly from the still live [snail] into the mouth of the devotee." This did not seem to have its intended effect of curing medical ills; devotees instead became violently ill as a result of drinking the snail mucus. Stewart claimed this was very traditional, though experts in East African religion claim to have never seen the snails used in this way before.
i love those!
Snails! *squees and flails*
Feed them cornmeal for three weeks, then eat them.
This isn't an invasion, it's Escargot SUV; enough for the whole family.
Apart from that fact their mucus makes humans violently ill. And the dangerous parasite. Apart from that, you have a good plan.
It'll be fine if you prepare cook em properly. Don't be such a wuss.
Leolo: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/jul/03/african-land-snails-video
The reason I said to feed them cornmeal for 3 weeks, is we don't know what they've been eating in the (urban) wild, so the cornmeal works to make 'sure' that they've gotten rid of anything they might have ingested which we wouldn't want to subsequently, and to sweeten them up.
West African religion + East African snail.
I read about those in Hawaii. They got so destructive to crops, people introduced the rosy wolf snail (aka cannibal snail), which lived up to its name and ate the native snails to extinction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euglandina_rosea
Googling cannibal snail yields more than one species. And some good pics.
- Terry Pratchett, Making Money
orishas are the collective gods and idols for the Yoruba religion, not a religion itself. this is a
obviously an attempt at misdirection. snails are mollusks. closely related to squid and octopi.it's the beginning of a land innovation buy the elder gods. chthulus cherubs, if you will.
and by innovation, I meant invasion.