cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Snails! Did I mention the snail thing? I found out a few days ago that a pond owned by a major tourism destination nearby is riddled with an invasive aquatic snail from the aquarium trade. They clearly introduced it to eat algae and its sort of taking over. I found the shells while I was out there looking for geese and afterward I realized what they were. These are about the size or maybe a little bigger than the snails you see used for escargots in French cooking. Definitely not native. So this is my new event/thingie/mini-project. I'm taking one of them over to Mary this evening to get her opinion on the species, since she worked in the trade for years. Assuming that it is what I think it is then I'm going to double check to make sure I am correct that it was illegal to introduce. Then I'm going to meet with the person in charge of the place and make my pitch. Basically I just want these things out of my ecosystem before they get into the rivers. I'm not looking to get them fined or shamed. But of course if they don't cooperate, I can make a couple of phone calls and produce those consequences for them. So I'm going to propose that I get a bunch of volunteers together to wade out there and pick up all of the snails that we can see. Then I'll get the local SCUBA club involved if at all possible to get the ones from the middle of the pond. At that point we'll have a ton of these snails and that evening I'll have an event for all of the volunteers where I get a French chef to cook them up with some white wine and garlic or whatever and make escargots. NPR will want to cover it and so will some regional newspapers and it will be great. And maybe people who read the story will recognize these things in ponds near them and make a point of doing something about the problem in their own backyards. Everybody wins. And naturally I'm going to send samples to a biologist friend that works for the state to test for any toxins before we collect and cook them. 4:53 p.m. - 2010-11-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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