The majority of people, when they see a snail, do not think to themselves, "This is great news." The same cannot be said of conservationists on the South Pacific island of Moorea, who were recently thrilled to catch sight of a snail species once thought to be extinct in the wild, KCUR reported.
The sighting of the Partula tohiveana was no accident — the species was reintroduced to the island by a consortium of zoos and organizations that formed in 1990 to rescue the nearly extinct snail.
After the St. Louis Zoo led efforts to coordinate a shipment in September of more than 3,200 P. tohiveana snails that had been raised in captivity, the conservationists held their breath and hoped that the snails would be able to survive in the wild.
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Their efforts were rewarded, as the snails were later seen behaving like regular snails, mainly feeding on dead plant material and fungus.
"This is the kind of news that you work your whole career for," Kayla Garcia, zoological manager of invertebrates at the St. Louis Zoo, told KCUR. "This is an amazing discovery, an amazing accomplishment, and you can't just can't help but just feel all of the good feelings coursing through you."
The P. tohiveana snail will now be upgraded from "extinct in the wild" to "critically endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species.
The return of the snails to the French Polynesian island is not just a boon to that species but to all species in the fragile ecosystem.
"These snails are part of a larger environment," said Garcia. "They are one piece in this puzzle, and you never know what happens when you take a piece of that puzzle out of any environment, and what happened with the Partula snails is something that happens all over the world."
Indeed, species becoming threatened, endangered, and extinct is something that is happening all over the world, due to human activities that cause pollution and habitat loss. However, so too is the reintroduction of threatened and endangered species, which has happened with gray wolves on the West Coast, boreal toads in Colorado, and many more.
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