Giant Snails Invade Florida

Edgewood_Dirk writes "First spotted in 2011, Giant African Land Snails have migrated to Florida, and are causing massive agricultural and social problems in the state. Hugely destructive to crops, the creatures themselves are dangerous, in that they are able to gnaw through stucco and plastics, will eat almost any organic material, their shells are hard enough to pop tires on the freeway and become shrapnel when run over by lawnmowers. Over a thousand are caught each week in Miami-Dade County and their numbers are only growing as more come out of hibernation. They also carry a form of rat lungworm which can cause meningitis in humans, although no human cases have been reported yet."

Re:what eats them?

[interkin3tic]

I think native Floridians would do a pretty good job of decimating the french.

It will be entertaining to watch, too. [twitter.com]

Mega Python vs Ultra Snail

[wjcofkc]

At this point I say we just evacuate and wall off Florida for fifty years and then take a peek and see how natural selection works this whole mess out. I'm half serious. I realize FL is home to all of these previously foreign creatures because the creatures themselves fit the environment they have been released into despite being foreign, but they will adapt and spread in response to both fighting for resources and further climate change. Although I suppose 50 foot pythons in the sewers of New York might take care of the rat problem.

Whew! Long time no post!

Re:News Articles are Identical

[geek]

Reuters is a news aggregate service like the AP. It's word for word because Fox, like most other news outlets, purchases the information from Reuters. Don't let your liberal bias against Fox get in the way of your retarded narrative though. I mean why let a potential flame against "the enemy" go to waste.

Fuck I'm tired of you people.

Re:And yet people worry about GMO crops

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It always amazes me that people worry so much about moving one or two genes around in plants in a thought out and carefully controlled manner yet they hardly worry about the introduction of whole functional genomes (i.e. invasive species) into ecosystems. Given the clear and deleterious impacts of introduced species (as opposed to those for GMOs which are debatable at best) you would think there would be large organizations of anti-introduced genome activists.

Why would you expect activists on an issue where there is virtually no counterpressure?

Accidental introductions still happen, reasonably frequently, and individual 'wildcat' introductions (usually of something that somebody thinks will be tasty and/or amusing to hunt/fish) do happen as well; but essentially nobody in anything resembling an authoritative role will even suggest a deliberate introduction in anything but the most cautious terms(and usually then only in an effort to control a prior introduction that got out of hand).

The sheer difficulty of the task, and the near-impossibility of eradicating established populations, works against the effort; but there is no activism because being against introduced species is already policy(and downright uncontroversial policy, at that).

GMOs, by contrast, have much more... effective... friends and allies, which provides their opponents with some incentive to try to push back.

Regardless of how good or bad their cause is, people rarely get worked up about things that are already going the way they want.

Re:Points at Giant Snails

[X0563511]

Yes, and they come with a very tasteful dash of rat lungworm to finish the meal.