After a slow start, the Campbell’s keeled glass-snails are now breeding like rabbits – or maybe like snails – with plans to reintroduce them to the island
First there’s a bulge on the right-hand side of the snail’s neck and then slowly – because everything in the snail world happens slowly – a fully formed baby snail emerges, shell and all.
The images showed a distinctive angular shape and a bicolour shell. Hyman was almost certain it was the “extinct” species. She went with colleagues to the island and Scott led her to the spot, where she overturned a decayed palm frond to find a line-up of the snails.Dr Isabel Hyman, a research scientist at the Australian Museum, inside a room full of breeding tanks of Campbell’s keeled glass-snail.“My heart was beating so fast. I was super excited.
But the fight to save the snail and to get the conditions just right for lots of baby-making was only just beginning. They tweaked the temperature, humidity, the diet , how they were fed and the vegetation in the tanks.Tarryn Williams Clow is a zookeeper and leads the captive breeding program for the snails at Taronga Zoo.
But exactly what it is they are doing to reproduce is a mystery. The snails are hermaphrodites, but nobody has ever seen them mating. Williams Clow has even been known to go into the zoo in the dead of night to see if she can catch them in the act.“They’re nocturnal and secretive so we haven’t been able to see them mate,” she says. “But I assume they’re getting up to lots.”
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