A group of endangered snails are getting a second lease on life in a remote Portuguese archipelago. The Guardian reports that for more than a century, there seemed to be no sign of the Desertas Island land snails on their native Deserta Grande, one of three islands in the chain near Madeira. Then, during conservation missions between 2012 and 2017, experts from Madeira's Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests, or IFCN, found small numbers—less than 200 each—of two species headed for extinction on the island, scooped them up, and brought them to zoos in France and the UK.
The scientists had to figure out quickly how to set up these relatively unknown snails for the best chance of survival, putting together simulated habitats and figuring out how to best breed them. "They'd never been in human care before and we had to start from a blank piece of paper and try to figure out what makes them tick," says Dr. Gerardo Garcia of the UK's Chester Zoo, where five dozen of the snails were brought and set up in a converted shipping container. Garcia says his staff spent "countless hours caring for every individual snail" and repopulating the species.
Now, more than 1,300 of the tiny snails, about the size of a pea, have been released on the nearby uninhabited island of Bugio, also in the archipelago and free of invasive species like rats, mice, and goats. The snails have been color-coded using nontoxic infrared markings for identification purposes, per the Independent. "This will allow us to spot them and track where they disperse to, how much they grow, how many survive, and how well they adapt to their new environment," says IFCN conservation biologist Dinarte Teixeira, per the BBC. He adds of the snails who were "on the edge of extinction," per the Guardian: "For 100 years we thought they'd gone for ever, but now there's new hope." (More snails stories.)
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