But it’s still a killer.

by Emily Willingham  

Perhaps you’ve heard the rumors about that “deadly snail” that’s allegedly an import species showing up in Houston carrying meningitis. Well, it’s not an imported species. It’s a native called the rosy wolf snail. Daily Mail fail!

I got suckered into the story myself in part because there was a video. A VIDEO! So irresistible. But …

As one of our Facebook page readers pointed out, the Texas Parks and Wildlife clarified on its Facebook page that the snail isn’t a threatening import but a native species. And a helpful one, at that.

According to the aptly monikered “Mollusk man” (snails are mollusks), a fellow who knows his Houston mollusks, the rosy wolf snail, Euglandina rosea, is beneficial to plants because … it destroys an invasive snail species that destroys plants. So don’t kill it. Leave it alone. Let it save your plants.

Mollusk man (a.k.a. Max Anton) also relates a typical tale of human intervention going horribly, disastrously astray. It’s a snail-eat-snail world out there. In an effort to end the scourge of another imported snail species in Hawaii, the Giant African Land Snail (also recently in the news; it’s the week for giant snail news), humans imported the rosy wolf snail to eat the invaders. As seems to happen with all such short-sighted, untested efforts, the rosy wolf snails completely ignored the giant African land snails (perhaps they were too giant?) and instead began consuming, with tremendous efficiency, the local Hawaiian snails. Not surprisingly, it’s other name is “the cannibal snail.”

The upshot was the extinction of more than 100 species of local snails and the continued persistence to this day of invasive rosy wolf snails in Hawaii.

Note to humans: These kinds of efforts are always a disaster. No. Introducing. Species.

[Image credit: Rosy wolf snail, by Dylan Parker, via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 license. Originally posted to Flickr by photographer Dylan Parker.]

Here’s a children’s book that one of our knowledgeable readers has recommended, all about the rosy wolf snail. It’s “big, strong, and fast … for a snail.”