Florida Battles Tide of Rat-Sized Giant African Land Snails

Think snails infesting your garden is bad? Try giant snails that grow as big as a rat and produce about 1,200 eggs a year. South Florida is currently fighting a plague of giant African land snails that are spreading across the state and are chewing through native plant species at a furious pace.

The giant African land snail is native to West Africa, and is the largest extant land snail species known. Like many gastropods, these snails are hermaphroditic, which means that they possess both male and female sex organs. Partly because of this, they can reproduce rapidly--this makes them difficult to eradicate in areas where they have been introduced.

First spotted in Florida in 2011, the snail has joined a group of species that are playing havoc with Florida's ecosystem, including the Burmese python and the lionfish. It's likely that the animal was introduced to the state when a Miami Santeria group, a religion with West African and Caribbean roots, brought the snails over for use in rituals, according to Reuters. However, it's also possible that snail eggs hitched a ride on a tourists' baggage in an accidental introduction.

In addition to munching on over 500 different species of plants, these snails also cause other problems. In some Caribbean countries, such as Barbados, the snails' shells can blow out tires on the highway; the animals themselves can coat walls and pavement with their slime and excrement. In addition, these creatures also carry a parasitic rat lungworm that can cause illness in humans, though no such cases have yet been identified in the United States.

But the issues don't stop there. The snails will also eat stucco and plaster, munching through it for its calcium content. This can cause major problems for homes, showing that the snails don't just cause complications for your garden.

Floridians can expect to see a tide of these creatures emerge as temperatures warm and their hibernation ends. So far, authorities have caught about 1,000 of these mollusks each week--117,000 in total since the first one was spotted in 2011. Get ready: the snail invasion has begun.