PAPER: “State warns Floridians to watch for giant African land snails”

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.

giantsnailsI 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.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."