Man, what a disappointment! With a headline like that I want to see shaky home video footage of local yokels running and screaming while 50-ft. tall snails ooze menacingly down the interstates running through the Everglades.
Okay, so it turns out that the so-called “giant” African land snails are kind of giant, relative to other snails. They’re eight inches long. And there is a reason to avoid them (they carry a parasite that can give you meningitis), but I’m still disappointed. I wanted to see pictures out of a Ray Harryhausen film or something! You just can’t use a headline that juicy if you aren’t going to deliver the goods.
I guess if I want to see giant snails menacing people, I’ll have to go rent The Monster That Challenged The World, which actually only challenged a small part of Southern California near San Diego after errupting from the Salton Sea–an accidentally-created artificial lake less than a hundred years old that nevertheless is home in the movie to giant snails that have been hibernating for millions of years.
An interesting tidbit about real-world snails: My sister is a biologist who works for the government, and one of her former assignments was going out in the field and doing a population survey of the local snail population. She and her team were supposed to collect a particular kind of snail and count how many there were in a zone. The trouble is, the species that they were assigned to count looks very much like another kind of snail that is a PREDATOR. Yes! That’s right! There are predator snails who will hunt down and the other snails that they look like! According to my sister, the predator snails were a real frustration because if you collected one by mistake you’d look down at your collecting pad later and see that there was a slow-motion snail-i-cidal attack underway, with a predator bearing down on one of the grazers at full speed and trying to eat it, which could–like–throw your snail count off or something.
