Endangered Partula Snails

Endangered Partula Snails Correspondent: WWF has set a global target for key regions for the earth surface should be protected to safeguard the diversity of ecosystems and the species that make up their dynamic whole. In the South Pacific lies one of the smallest nature reserves in the world. It’s home to one of the smallest endangered species in the world the Partula Snail. London Zoo’s Dave Clop is the self appointed guardian of the Partula. Dave: These snails which may not look particularly exciting are quite small are actually the most endangered animals in the whole zoo and certainly one of the top 10 rarest animals in the world. The reason they become endangered is that in 1960’s man introduced a Giant African Land Snails as potential food crop. They were such a pest that in 1970’s the local authorities introduced biological control to try and control their numbers and this was another snail called Euglandina which is a predator snail and it feeds on other snails as specialist and it moves 2 or 3 times as fast that any other snail and follows their slime trails and we call the -- of the snail world. They’re very efficient predators. The thing is they don’t like great big snails. It’s like Giant African Snails what they like are small bite sized snails like these endemic Partula snails and what happened on – is that the predators spread very fast and the native snails and didn’t control the giant land snail and in some cases it caused extinction of the local species within 10 years. Correspondent: In an effort to reintroduce the Partula Snail to the wild David Clop released a number of captive bred Partula Snails into a special reserve at the Gump South Gump South Pacific research station on the Island of Moorea in 1996. 2 years later it was time to find out whether the snail survived. David: Oh I’m not sure about that I’m make sure one of the predators aren’t afraid yeah inside oh god we’ve got problems. Okay come here you. Well this is the snail that we try to keep out of enclosure. It’s a full grown Euglandina Rosea predator snail. It’s the last thing we would like to find inside the reserve itself. The barrier of the reserve is metal sheeting but it supports an electric fence and a soft – and those two things are very good at keeping out snails and will normally keep out these predator snail but the problem is they’ve got to be maintained. They have got to be looked at properly. We’ll have a check around now and try to find out where the problems are. Here we’ve actually found a hole in the side of the barrier which where corrosion is a whole rust is eaten through the metal of the barrier and if they manage to get across the soil then they would be able to easily climb through that gap. That’s an easy point for the predator snails to actually gain access to the reserve itself. Correspondent: Despite today’s discovery of predators inside the reserve there’s some good news too. David: What we’re going to do now is we’re going to collect Partula snails we can find in here and we’ve already decided that we’re going to taking it back to the UK now after two years of running the experiment we now want to step back from the reserve and look at the results over the past 2 years and decide our strategy for the future. Correspondent: The snails and the test results from the South Pacific experiments are brought back to London Zoo. They’re analyzed before any decision on what happens next to the wild Partula snail can be made. David: We got some interesting results so they’re not all brilliant. We’ve had some problems with predator snails still getting into the reserve and really to look at the management but the best thing is that we have managed to collect a population of Partula snails which are being bred all –for the first time in over 10 years and it shows that the captured bred animals can breed in the wild when they’re young or viable which is the most important thing so it was resorted at the management we can see about the future of the reserve itself. Correspondent: In geological time, natural cataclysms caused mass extinctions. Humans are now the main agents of extinction and it will be for us to decide if the thousands of species now threatened with oblivion can survive.