Hello Friends of COASTAL PLAIN CONSERVATION GROUP (CPCG),
This is a quick note to share positive news amid the upheaval we are experiencing as a consequence of a “Frankenstein we cannot see,” otherwise known as the Novel Coronavirus. More thoughts about that in coming in Notes From The Fray.
As you may already know, from 1992 to present, we (now CPCG) have all but single-handedly prevented extinction of two charming aquatic animals that once inhabited beaver ponds and slow streams connected with the lower Cape Fear River. Both species are now gone from the wild but they are not extinct because my family has enabled (more like allowed) me to do whatever has been needed to keep these critters from disappearing into the emptiness of extinction. What started as one person’s crusade is now CPCG’s campaign to prevent species extinction; regardless of glamor, size, or familiarity.
With that as brief background (more below), you might understand my excitement, beginning with discovery of this year’s first P. magnifica egg mass on 29 March 2020 (below left). As added good news, the eggs are hatching at the time of this writing; 15 April. But wait, there’s more: on 12 April, while conducting a water change in one of the 300 gallon tanks harboring Greenfield Ramshorn, an adult Greenfield Ramshorn was revealed on the stem of last year’s dead plant matter, including Duck Potato, Sagittaria falcata.
The specific 300 gallon tank has supported successive generations of Greenfield Ramshorn since 2004. The snail found this week is an adult, two years old, and a member of the Greenfield Class of 2018. It’s a survivor and, even though confined to a relatively small tank, it’s a challenging animal to track amid the tangle of submerged duck potato and water lily stems; especially considering adults are a mere 5mm across their colorful shell.
With these rare snails winter is a nail-biting time fraught with monitoring and management efforts, to prevent rapid shifts in their water temperature, resulting from wild changes in weather. It’s the same during hurricane season when tanks must be covered prior to a storm bringing salty rain water.
The image above shows CPCG’s Planorbidae Conservatory (left); a collection of several aquaculture tanks ranging in size from 150 to 300 gallons each (right). The tanks, some dating back to 1993, house two of the world’s rarest freshwater snails: Planorbella magnifica, the Magnificent Ramshorn, and Helisoma eucosmium, the Greenfield Ramshorn (images below).
These two charming animals are no longer found in their former wild habitat; beaver ponds and slow-flowing streams associated with the bottomland swamps that, until recently, fringed the lower Cape Fear River.
The pond in the image above is one of P. magnifica’s four known historic habitats; this one in Brunswick County, NC. In 1996, saltwater flooding, pushed by Hurricane Fran, inundated the pond and ultimately killed the P. magnificapopulation that lived in its water. At the same time, snails in captive care at our former home near Bradley Creek, a tidal saltmarsh creek in Wilmington, were also upset when Fran pushed water into our yard and under our house, while also overturning the then small collection of tanks that harbored several hundred P. magnifica raised from the animals collected back in 1992.
With regret, I was only able to rescue 25 snails after unwisely wading into the flood to collectwhatever snails I could grab from tanks being pushed by flowing water and raging wind. Admittedly, it was a foolhardy act that, unknown to me at the time, was witnessed by my distressed family members. By good fortune, our then young sons had a ten gallon aquarium in their room that was quickly converted from holding crayfish to sheltering snails. Sadly even very diluted saltwater is deadly to P. magnifica, and over several days’ time only 12 survived their brief saltwater dip.
After clearing our discombobulated property of fallen trees, with help from Larry Cahoon, a chainsaw-wielding friend and now CPCG Board Member, we righted and refilled the tanks and the snail population swelled back into hundreds by the early 2000s. But by that time I was worrying about genetic inbreeding.
Then, in 2004 while investigating a report of a former millpond suddenly devoid of turtles, son Carson and I serendipitously discovered the pond harbored a previously unknown population of P.magnifica! The site was a millpond a century ago and this was our first foray into what had become more of a swollen stretch of a Cape Fear River tributary stream; which required a three mile paddle up a creek and much scrambling over many logs, in the exuberant company of the daughter-father team that first alerted me to the pond’s turtle plight (more about that later).
As usual on such forays, I brought nets, jars and coolers and these quickly filled with water, snails, snail egg masses and bits of plant matter, all destined for our new snail facility in Pender County, 55 feet above sea level and safe from salty flood water. The new snails were kept isolated from the original population to ensure the newly-collected P. magnifica were genetically clean and not hybridized with a very common and widely distributed close cousin, the Marsh Ramshorn, Planorbella trivolvis (turns-out my early research proved the two species are promiscuous).
Genetic testing in 2009 proved the captiveanimals were pure P. magnifica and, encouraged with that revelation, the two populations were carefully blended, one tank at a time. As hoped,the resultant offspring significantly outnumbered previous years’ generations.
Today, the snails are considered extirpated (gone from the wild) but they are not extinct because the last living members of Magnificent Ramshorn and Greenfield Ramshorn are in CPCG’s Planorbid Conservatory, where, to put a fine point on it, they have been stewarded from extinction since 1992 and 2008, respectively.
How We Got Here
The respective snails’ plight begins with a decline in beaver ponds resulting from overhunting Cape Fear region beavers back in the 1800s. By good fortune, while beaver ponds disappeared, the local rice industry was building mill ponds; what I think of as “surrogate beaver ponds,” including Wilmington’s own Greenfield Lake, where both species once dwelled, and the namesake for Greenfield Ramshorn.
The image above reveals dead and dying Bald Cypress, Taxodium distichum, lining a tributary to the Cape Fear River in Brunswick County, NC; a stream that supported P. magnifica before river dredging allowed salty ocean water to intrude into this once freshwater ecosystem.
The snails’ “golden parachute” offered by 19thcentury mill ponds was short-lived, ecologically-speaking, because decades of dredging the Cape Fear River has enabled salty ocean water to drown the former mill ponds, along with tens of thousands of bottomland swamp acreage in Brunswick and New Hanover Counties; notably the very habitats that once supported these now imperiled snails, along with many kinds of plants and wildlife that require freshwater swamps to complete their full life cycle.
Snails: Rivets Holding-Together Our Planet’s Ecosystem
I am often asked “Why snails?” The simple answer is, freshwater snails consume aquatic plants and detritus. Their wastes are food for other snails, numerous worms, and countless aquatic insects and crustaceans. In turn, these smallest beings are food for small fishes that are in turn food for medium-size fishes that are in their turn food for such things as bass. Cutting to the chase, growing a ten pound largemouth bass in the wild requires it to eat more than 100 pounds of smaller fishes, that must in their turn consume more than 1,000 pounds of smaller fishes, that in their turn had to eat at least 10,000 pounds of littler creatures that got their sustenance with help from the poop generated by grazing snails.
This same kind of relationship is also found in fields, forests, and every other habitat supporting predators and their prey. And all of them, and us, depend wholly on plants, Earth’s primary producers and drivers of ecosystems that sustain us as a species.
CPCG is committed to prevent extinction of small snails because they are “living rivets” providing, in nature, ecosystem services that benefit other members of the same ecosystem. As John Muir once observed, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” This ecological truth applies to snails as much as, if not more than, such glamorous things as Largemouth Bass, a gamefish that anglers annually spend several billions of dollars nationwide to chase, catch and release (as apex predators largemouth bass bio-accumulate mercury making them unsafe for us to eat). That’s just one small connection between ecosystem health and economic wellbeing.
Where To From Here?
Our goal is seeing P. magnifica and H. eucosmiumestablished back in the wild swamps where they belong, albeit safely upstream beyond the foreseeable reach of salty water. We think this is warranted because taxpayer-funded agencies including the US Corps of Engineers and the NC State Ports Authority are responsible for the saltwater intrusion currently drowning Cape Fear River’s downstream swamps; extirpating salt-intolerant species, including snails, in the process.
We’ve requested the US Fish & Wildlife Service to declare P. magnifica a Federal Endangered Species, the Service as recently as summer 2019, declined to provide the species with helpful protection, in spite of their own admission that the species is gone from the wild; a claim supported by their own surveys and those conducted by the NC Wildlife Resources Commission (which has listed the species as State Endangered).
After more than 20 years of persistent requests for listing, I still won’t speculate why USFWS declines to list the species as endangered, but the simplest explanation might be connected to the Wilmington State Port, the river dredging conducted to its benefit, and the risk of State and Federal Agencies being called-upon to mitigate some of the thousands of swamp acres destroyed by saltwater intrusion resulting from their public-funded river dredging.
As if swamp loss due to saltwater intrusion were not enough, NC’s wetland forests, including swamps, are under attack by an insidious and disingenuous energy scheme built on the false narrative that claims burning American trees to electrify Europe is carbon neutral. Nothing could be further from the truth but this scheme is a profit venture for a few corporations that operate in the black only because the wood-to energy scheme is subsidized with taxpayer funding. More about this issue can be found here:
At the risk of stating the obvious, species extinction is the single greatest threat to life on Earth. Before our species’ own mortality was brought into sharp focus by the coronavirus pandemic, I was working to prevent extinction of two rare snails. Looking back on the 28 years I’ve spent with two charming snails, I see more clearly the imperative need to protect every ecological rivet we can, whether bird, mammal, fish, or snail. They hold-together the global ecosystem that our species requires for our own continued survival.
Species Protection Is Relevant Now
The current coronavirus pandemic is a wake-up call to action in support of species protection, including our own. Our future health requires protecting the integrity of Earth’s biota, of which we are a member; but maybe not the most important member. Think largemouth bass. Like the bass, we may sit at the top of our food pyramid, but that only means we have the most to lose if the pyramid base begins to crumble as a consequence of our own natural resource mismanagement.
Simply put, CPCG protects snails as a goal-driven objective to protect Homo sapiens; people. And after more than 28 years in the doing, I’m flummoxed that the USFWS, the federal agency responsible for protecting American wildlife, can’t seem to understand the connection that John Muir so succinctly articulated.
The current pandemic has inspired a sense of “We’re all in this together.” Too true. And we’re all stuck here on Earth, people, birds, turtles, snails and all the rest of us Earthlings.
In times of stress, as we are experiencing now, it’s okay to rejoice in small victories, small successes, and small acts of kindness.
We have many challenges ahead of us as we cope-with and eventually overcome this pandemic. I remain optimistic for the future condition that next generations will create from the resources we leave them. Quoting Also Leopold, the father of American conservation, “when tinkering with nature, it’s best to not lose any parts.”
To that end, CPCG is protecting snails to ensure Earth’s ecological engines have all their parts.
With discovery of 2020’s first Magnificent Ramshorn egg mass, and soon after finding an adult Greenfield Ramshorn, I am compelled to paraphrase Emily Dickinson by saying, “Hope is the thing with a shell.”
Be safe and I’ll stay in touch…at distance.