00:00A pea-sized snail once thought to have disappeared has been saved from the edge of extinction,
00:10a British zoo says.
00:12The Greater Bermuda Land Snail had not been seen for years until 2014 when a group was
00:18spotted in an alleyway in the Bermudan capital, Hamilton.
00:24Some were flown to Chester Zoo where experts spent years building up the population before
00:28releasing thousands back into the wild in 2019.
00:33Unique to Bermuda, this type of snail traces its lineage back over a million years, a relic
00:39of the island's ancient ecosystem.
00:42Katie Kelton from Chester Zoo is overjoyed and says they have confirmed breeding of the
00:47snail on the island.
00:49It's absolutely amazing that we've actually been able to save this species because it
00:55doesn't happen very often.
00:56The fact that we've been able to do it and we've been able to do it so successfully
00:59and we've got confirmed breeding on the island of these guys and everything, it's just fantastic.
01:04It really is touching because a lot of people don't give snails enough credit, I mean they're
01:08such a massive part of the ecosystem and they do a lot for the decomposition of like plant
01:14matter and the recycling of nutrients into the soil and they're often overlooked and
01:19I mean I will forever be an advocate for the snail and it's so nice that we're actually
01:23giving these guys attention.
01:25A study in the Oryx Biodiversity Conservation Journal found that six colonies of the rewilded
01:32snails had settled successfully on the archipelago.
01:37The snails faced many threats including habitat loss, pesticide use and the cannibalistic wolf
01:43snail.
01:44So really with breeding it is pretty simple, it's just we need to get the environment right
01:49so that they'll do it themselves basically.
01:52So we need to make sure the humidity is right, that they've got the right food and that the
01:55temperature is appropriate for the season that they would breed in.
01:59After that they pretty much will get on with it themselves and they will start laying eggs
02:02in the soil.
02:03After about a month those eggs will start hatching and we'll get the baby snails.
02:08And once they pop out we need to start feeding them a little bit more and make sure that
02:11they can survive through those first crucial months.
02:14I think the largest population we've had in here at one point was about 60,000 which is
02:18a lot of snails to look after which is a lot of chopping lettuce, sweet potato and carrots.
02:25Lots and lots of special supplement food so we make our own, as we call it, Bermuda powder
02:31which is a mixture of spirulina, calcium and fish flake.
02:34And so we're going through a lot, a lot of food when we're feeding these guys and it
02:37can take a lot of hours worth of labour but it's a labour of love really because we've
02:41managed to actually do something great with these snails.
02:45The snails were rescued in a process described as a war game with growing numbers tracked by
02:50flags pinned across a map of Bermuda.
03:04theс╗Сmtra.co school for fun will be a particular environment here.
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