GIANT AFRICAN LAND SNAIL

Along with chameleons that regularly appeared in our garden when we arrived here over thirty years ago were the most enormous snails the children had ever seen. I write in the past tense for these – along with the glow worms, fire flies and the long earthworms the Hadeda Ibises used to pull from the ground like spaghetti – have disappeared. We cannot say when we last saw them, or noticed their disappearance. It was probably a gradual process that we were unaware of us our children grew up and we were all so busy. The thing is, we haven’t seen any of these creatures in our garden for a very, very long time. How often do we truly appreciate things only once they have left? We take so much of nature for granted.

I recall finding bleached empty shells such as this one in our garden:

It is so long since we used to find large empty snail shells or seen the very large snails that I had practically forgotten about them. That is until I walked along the close-cropped grass of the old golf course recently: apart from trees, aloes and a few bushes, this area looks fairly bleak in terms of things of interest. That is until I spotted a blob out of the corner of my eye and stopped to take a closer look at this:

The Giant African Land Snail one of the largest terrestrial gastropods. They have light to dark brown shells with vertical stripes of a darker shade of brown on them. This colour depends on the prevailing environmental conditions.

The snail has two short tentacles and two long ones that have the eyes.

These snails have a muscular foot that releases a silvery mucous-like substance that helps to reduce friction and protects the tissues of this ‘foot’.

It is useful to know that the Giant African Snail is herbivorous, eating a range of plant material. This leads to them being regarded as a pest in some quarters. I would enjoy seeing one in my garden again.