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Giant Snails Invade Florida
Edgewood_Dirk writes "First spotted in 2011, Giant African Land Snails have migrated to Florida, and are causing massive agricultural and social problems in the state. Hugely destructive to crops, the creatures themselves are dangerous, in that they are able to gnaw through stucco and plastics, will eat almost any organic material, their shells are hard enough to pop tires on the freeway and become shrapnel when run over by lawnmowers. Over a thousand are caught each week in Miami-Dade County and their numbers are only growing as more come out of hibernation. They also carry a form of rat lungworm which can cause meningitis in humans, although no human cases have been reported yet."
I'm hoping we can get the pythons to eat the snails.
time to import some predators
Giant snail racing. Hell yes.
Am I the only person that pictured an elderly retiree running from a giant snail in a slow motion chase after reading the title of the article?
It sounds like it's time to salt the roads in Florida.
Could things be any better, here in the Sunshine state?
They eat stucco.
In just 24 short months, it is possible that South Florida returns to its native habitat.
BONUS: With the new, snail-driven housing scarcity introduced to an otherwise depressed real estate bubble, rewards are again possible for developers and speculators!
Now, mind that sinkhole. We've got a Colombian cocaine submarine to rendezvous with.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Make it a criminal offense to eat them. They will be "poached" out of existence.
this sounds like a job for FLORIDA MAN !!!
erm, then again, maybe not...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Top general Erwin Gastropod calls it Schildkrötenkrieg
They would, but they're having a difficult time getting a required photo ID.
I am officially gone from
"If you got a ham sandwich in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic, or an orange, and you didn't eat it all and you bring it back into the States and then you discard it, at some point, things can emerge from those products," Feiber said.
Remember kids, finish your oranges just in case there are baby snails in there. Don't discard, digest!
Your German is perfect! Both in your grammar, and the quality of your joke.
I can't wait for the opportunity to use my Biden-mandated shotgun on some fat ass ducks and crabs down yonder in the Sunshine State. Booking my vacation for n+{duckDigestion && crabDigestion}*time days from now...
Whoever named these things might have missed one of this species' abilities.
At this point I say we just evacuate and wall off Florida for fifty years and then take a peek and see how natural selection works this whole mess out. I'm half serious. I realize FL is home to all of these previously foreign creatures because the creatures themselves fit the environment they have been released into despite being foreign, but they will adapt and spread in response to both fighting for resources and further climate change. Although I suppose 50 foot pythons in the sewers of New York might take care of the rat problem.
Whew! Long time no post!
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Wasn't that already one of those craptastic SciFi, made-for-TV movies?
You're kidding, they are all about gay mariage ! hermaphrodites you know !!!
He usually does cocaine when he comes down off his acid trip.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Problem is that they are appointed as counting officials.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
steak sauce, im thinking the problem can be eradicated fairly quickly.
http://eideard.com/2009/07/04/how-to-prepare-african-land-snail-for-dinner/
Good people go to bed earlier.
It always amazes me that people worry so much about moving one or two genes around in plants in a thought out and carefully controlled manner yet they hardly worry about the introduction of whole functional genomes (i.e. invasive species) into ecosystems. Given the clear and deleterious impacts of introduced species (as opposed to those for GMOs which are debatable at best) you would think there would be large organizations of anti-introduced genome activists.
...heeeereee.....theyyyyy...commmmmme. Ruuuuunnnnn!!!
"Look mom, I got these 2 pet snails from our last trip to Africa"
Mom: "Oh my, throw that stuff away!"
Kid goes to nearest pond and dumps them... no natural predators around, fast-forward a few months and boooom! Huge agricultural disaster, yaddah yaddah...
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
Would be nice if they could introduce a version that only ate kudzu. ;)
Tweeks
A little bowl of flat beer in the garden works well on the normal variety of snails and slugs. So to handle these monster snails just set up a few troughs of imperial stout.
I'm going to capture one and name it "Gary".
Reuters is a news aggregate service like the AP. It's word for word because Fox, like most other news outlets, purchases the information from Reuters. Don't let your liberal bias against Fox get in the way of your retarded narrative though. I mean why let a potential flame against "the enemy" go to waste.
Fuck I'm tired of you people.
Well, do you ? :)
I really wonder what kind of an agricultural disaster could emerge from a presumably safe for human consumption ham sandwich or an orange... Isn't this just government propaganda from an agency that frankly said doesn't know what to do with itself anymore?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yes but in Australia the things that will kill you tend to hide. In Africa it's mostly apparent where the death is coming from.
No offense to the people of South Florida, but between this, pythons, gators, numerous poison snakes, etc., I'm glad I live up north. The most dangerous things we have up here are bears, you've generally got to go into the woods to find them, and somehow I'd rather be attacked by a fellow mammal. Hold it, you've got them too, right?
Examples: California Candor, Dwarf Alberta Spruce, American Redwood, Canadian Maple
African killer bees, African land snails, West Nile virus, Madras eye, Burmese python
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Gastropod Americans who might have entered the country without proper documentation should not be discriminated against, and they deserve a path to citizenship too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Pantsu
Actually, I was bashing mainstream media as a whole, not just Fox. I /mentioned/ FoxNews because it was one of the two articles used in the summary. If it had been MSNBC I would have dropped their name as well.
I mean, I did suggest people see how /all/ the news articles on Google are word-for-word identical to the Reuters feed. My comment was intended as an indictment of news media as a whole and a warning about how Slashdot should be careful not to fall into the same trap.
Regardless, that is /still/ no excuse for any news organization - FoxNews or otherwise - for simply copying-and-pasting an article from Reuters without adding anything new. It's one thing to use Reuters as a starting point for a story and quite another to just pass it off as your own reporting, which is what happens far, far too often. FoxNews is guilty of this, as are the dozens of other papers, TV shows and news outlets as my suggested search will reveal.
God, I am tired of "you people" standing up for a news organization as if you somehow owe them your loyalty, especially when not one of them gives a damn about you except as a way to sell advertisements..
Before you can do anything, you need to become acquainted with some basics about the land snails.
Conveniently, someone provided an excellent summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTV23B5gBsQ
BONUS: With the new, snail-driven housing scarcity introduced to an otherwise depressed real estate bubble, rewards are again possible for developers and speculators!
Extra bonus: cheap meat.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Isn't that kinda, y'know, a useful ability? I'm picturing steel compost bins full of snails and old deli containers.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
And pork can carry trichinosis and many other parastes and diseases dangerous to humans. As can beef, chicken, fish, and pretty much any other animal, though the risk tends to reduce as their biochemistry gets progressively more divergent from our own. That's why they tell you to cook meat thoroughly, *especially* things like pork that can carry a lot of infections that can migrate to humans. Also one of the (several) reasons bushmeat is frowned on - almost anything that can survive in a monkey or ape will be right at home in a human.
Plants are generally safe to eat raw simply because they are *so* biologically different that almost nothing that infects them is likely to be able to jump to humans, so the risks tend to be restricted to poisons produced by either the plant or its parasites, and cooking doesn't help with many of those.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Good idea! We could then get the tourists to eat the pythons!
Or the pythons to eat the tourists; either way, we win!
Maybe we can get VisitFlorida.com to promote braised Burmese Python with African Snail under glass au jus as a local delicacy. I mean, it worked for oysters. . . .
If they can chew kevlar, they're my new superheroes.
...salt shortage in S. Florida or something? Last I check they didn't like salt too much.
Instead of spending millions on pest control and mitigation, we should spend those dollars on marketing, showing the benefits of using these snails as a valid food source. Once enough people perceive them to be edible, or better yet, desirable, then the problem solves itself to the benefit of our food production system.
Collectively speaking, we Americans have had the luxury of eating premier proteins (beef, chicken, pork) for so long that we've become spoiled and will have a hard time getting over the 'yuck factor' involved here.
You stereotypers are all the same...
You mean besides the ones with blue hair driving at 30 MPH on a 45 MPH divided highway? Because we've had those for a while.
It's the only way to be sure.
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They (PDF warning) dealt with the same invasion back in the '50s
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The Reuters article (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/14/us-usa-florida-snails-idUSBRE93D05620130414) about this mentions they eat through stucco and plasTERS, not plastics.
Yeah, my first thought was "Do they go well with lots of garlic and butter??"
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You dumb ass still doesn't get it. It's a NEWS aggregate SERVICE. Just like the fucking associated press. No news network can be in all places at once so they pool resources into Reuters and AP and pull the same info all over the world. What part of that doesn't your dumb ass get? Seriously. Fucking die already, you're a cancer on society.
Wouldn't you feel bad if this person commits suicide because of your rant?
Everyone settledown, the snails aren't going to kill you today... If they started at your toes right now, you'd still have a good month left. Make the most of it.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Yes, and they come with a very tasteful dash of rat lungworm to finish the meal.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
They've got teeny black bears, 300lb for the males and only 200 for the females on average. Compare that to Ursus americanus cinnamomum found in the yellowstone area where cubs can get to 165lbs. There's also only ~3,000 total for the state (up from ~300 in the 1970's). I'd be MUCH more worried about a crash caused by these snails blowing a tire than I would be of getting attacked by a Florida black bear.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Quick! Someone edit the Bugs Bunny GIF so that instead it's a giant snail gnawing through their northern border and sending them off into the ocean! Cause this might actually be a realistic scenario! Hurrah!
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
In the cooler climate states, we have salt trucks in the winter time that spread salt or a salty brine mixture on the roadways to help melt the snow. Seems like a fairly simple way to deter snail shrapnel on the roadways.
This amused me more than it probably should have, but I'm having a hard time spotting the Chobits connection here...
not plane, nor bird, nor even frog...
The spiral pattern that catches the eye...
Unretouched pictures, from Florida
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
There's been speculation that North Korea would do something on April 15th. Some people are pointing to the Boston Marathon bombing, but perhaps this is it.
Oh, so you say "But the TFS says that they were first noticed in 2011....."
When did Kim Jong Un come to power? Yes, 2011. Perhaps they've now activated a massive communist snailnet in the US.
That would be called "chickens". (they cannot eat the stems, but they'll sure as hell eat the leaves.)
Wouldn't you feel bad if this person commits suicide because of your rant?
Not in the slightest.
Don't worry. I won't.
And thank you, I was /well aware/ of what Reuters does. That's why I said the FoxNews article was identical with the one from Reuters, and not the other way around.
But what you don't seem to understand is my objection to news agencies simply copying stories off the wire and posting it as their own, without adding anything new. Essentially, this creates a single picture for the event - the one presented by Reuters. Now, for smaller papers, this is an understandable necessity; they don't have the resources to send a reporter down to Florida or even significantly rework a story. But for the major outlets, including FoxNews? I find this highly objectionable. It also makes me wonder why I should bother with the individual outlets if they are all telling the exact same tale (and I mean exact; almost all the stories are word for word the same).
Now, perhaps you feel this odd desire to have more than one viewpoint on a story makes me a "cancer on society". That's your opinion and welcome to it. News media increasingly is losing the trust of its readers and I think the above may be one of the reasons . Myself, I'd like some more effort put into the news than what I am getting, especially from outlets which purport to be independent and capable of offering better. I apologize if this irrational - and perhaps idealistic - desire of mine offends you. But I'm hardly going to recant because of it.
Ah. This is obviously some strange usage of the word "teeny" that I hadn't previously been aware of.
[End Of Line]
If I have learnt something from The Simpsons, is that Florida only needs to leave in the wild snail eating snakes to fix this problem.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Escargot, por favor.
And be sure to cook thoroughly
It's the most famous of the classic blunders, you insensitive clod.
What do they taste like? The quickest way to end an infestation problem is to find a way to make the infestation taste good.
It's a rhetorical device called litotes, a form of irony. Not for the first time on /...
I for one welcome our new slow-moving slime-laden overlords.
If you cooked them well, the lungworm wouldn't be a problem. But of course many people wouldn't cook them well and would be infested with rat lungworm. If people are dumb enough to smoke cigarettes, they are more than dumb enough to not cook these bad boys well enough.
"freedom escargot"
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.