Several groups of conservationists banded together to restore a snail species thought to be extinct in the wild — and their efforts are yielding good results, as Smithsonian Magazine reported.
The tiny, less-than-one-inch-long tree snail species known as Partula tohiveana is native to French Polynesia. There, these snails play an important role by eating decaying plant matter, thereby keeping the forests healthy. However, it hadn't been spotted in the wild in more than four decades before a coalition of zookeepers and conservationists stepped in.
These efforts have seen them, over the past 10 years, breed P. tohiveana snails in captivity and then fly them to the French Polynesian island of Mo'orea once a year in hopes of seeing them begin to reproduce in the wild.
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The gambit finally paid off this year, as the scientists making their annual trip to deliver new snails noticed some P. tohiveana snails without the marking painted on the ones they would drop off, meaning that new ones had been born in the wild.
"This is the kind of news that you work your whole career for," said Kayla Garcia, zoological manager of invertebrates at the St. Louis Zoo, one of the groups involved in the project. "This is an amazing discovery, an amazing accomplishment, and you just can't help but just feel all of the good feelings coursing through you."
The discovery means that the P. tohiveana, which is currently listed as "Extinct in the Wild" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List, could soon be upgraded to "Critically Endangered."
As explained by the St. Louis Zoo's official Instagram account, "Partula snails experienced a devastating decline when the predatory rosy wolf snails (Euglandina rosea) were introduced to French Polynesian islands in the 1970s as a form of biological control."
Conservation efforts started not too long after scientists began to notice the decline, but it has taken decades of diligence for that work to pay off. The entire episode is a useful reminder that just as humans can (and so often do) cause problems that harm species, we also have the ability to help those species thrive once again.
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