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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.
Giant snail racing. Hell yes.
The French?
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?
According to Wikipedia *people* eat them:
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
According to an article:
The hermit crab is one of the most dangerous predators to the Achatina fulica and has been known to use the shell as its home. The coconut crab also views the Achatina fulica as a delicacy. The domesticated duck along with a vast variety of other bird species forage on Giant African Snails. Other mammals such as the wild pig prey on Achatina fulica.
Ducks... the US needs lots and lots of ducks.
It sounds like it's time to salt the roads in Florida.
The French?
But what will we do when the French start to run amuck?!
Why, then we get Germans!
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
I hear people do in Africa but that's about it. An African guy I used to work with said that when they're cooked the smell is horrific.
They're really terrible creatures, when crushed they release eggs, their poop is profuse and a lot like epoxy glue, and of course they're quite gross themselves. Any two can reproduce together, they can easily overrun an area.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I think native Floridians would do a pretty good job of decimating the french.
It will be entertaining to watch, too.
Your German is perfect! Both in your grammar, and the quality of your joke.
Russian winters.
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!
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...heeeereee.....theyyyyy...commmmmme. Ruuuuunnnnn!!!
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.
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.
Russian winters eat everybody, Germans, French even Swedes. About the only ones able to hack it are Finns and the Russians themselves.
Hence the first rule of warfare: never invade Russia (The Art of Warfare, Sun Tzu, revised edition).
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.
Why would you expect activists on an issue where there is virtually no counterpressure?
Accidental introductions still happen, reasonably frequently, and individual 'wildcat' introductions (usually of something that somebody thinks will be tasty and/or amusing to hunt/fish) do happen as well; but essentially nobody in anything resembling an authoritative role will even suggest a deliberate introduction in anything but the most cautious terms(and usually then only in an effort to control a prior introduction that got out of hand).
The sheer difficulty of the task, and the near-impossibility of eradicating established populations, works against the effort; but there is no activism because being against introduced species is already policy(and downright uncontroversial policy, at that).
GMOs, by contrast, have much more... effective... friends and allies, which provides their opponents with some incentive to try to push back.
Regardless of how good or bad their cause is, people rarely get worked up about things that are already going the way they want.
My understanding is that the primary risk isn't from eating them(though I'd certainly be careful during prep, and if some horrid little cyst is just fine after being boiled I definitely didn't advise it); but the fact that they serve as a natural reservoir for the parasites and more or less continually shed them into the environment.
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?
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
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
For example, though flowers from africa represent a small portion of total cut flowers imported in the US, one can imagine baby snails using them as a vector. Apparently most of the cut flowers go through Miami.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Isn't that kinda, y'know, a useful ability? I'm picturing steel compost bins full of snails and old deli containers.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
There are native Floridians?
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.
Hence the first rule of warfare: never invade Russia (The Art of Warfare, Sun Tzu, revised edition).
I thought the first rule of warfare is: "never get involved in a land war in Asia"
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
The Wikipedia article (first link) explains that they have no natural predators, ...
It wouldn't be surprising if the Everglade kite learns to eat them. This is a local subspecies listed as "endangered", and its favorite food is Florida's largest native snail, the apple snail. If so, this may help the kite survive.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.........
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.
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Ah. This is obviously some strange usage of the word "teeny" that I hadn't previously been aware of.
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