cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Snails, ho! This snail thing is getting interesting (hey, how often does one get to type those words?) Its looking more and more like these things got into the pond from someone dumping out an aquarium illegally. Which begs the question: what else is in there? I've asked for permission to drag a net through the water to see what other species are lurking. I'm also concerned about exotic parasites that these snails often tend to harbor and I don't know whether these would be transmissible to native species. Today I decided that it was time to get a state biologist in on this. I emailed the biologist who is in charge of this district but I got an auto-reply that he is out of the office for a few weeks. Meanwhile, I'm not going to let that stop me from moving ahead on the eradication. I'll just be sure to save specimens for him to test later. The neat thing about this project is that for the first time in the course of working on this new book, I'm actually sounding an alarm and doing something constructive that is absolutely concrete. There is an invasive species that I noticed in the wild and nobody else knew that it was there. It is breeding, it is known to be an ecological threat, and right now it may be confined to a single pond where I can eat my way through them. Acting solely on my own, I organized a project to eradicate them while making news that will educate people about why they shouldn't dump their aquariums out into ponds when they get bored with them. Yay me! Ok, the news about this hasn't happened yet but I assure you that it will. The publicity will be handled carefully and I'm pretty sure that I can get a full article with photos and video out into the AP. Mary is going to serve as not only the chef but also as the aquarium expert, since she worked in the trade for years. Since she is a personal chef and is trying to build her business, this will be really awesome advertising for her. In all seriousness, I am going to get this picked up by the AP. I'm waiting until after the meeting to talk to my people at Sl0w Food to see about making this an official event and get their help with the round-up. I swear, somebody should really just hire me as a publicist. 5:53 p.m. - 2010-11-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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