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🇦🇺 Australia /Environment & Climate

It looks harmless, but this stealthy snail is wreaking enormous damage

From ABC Australia · () English

Translated from English and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources Ongoing story
  • Tourism operators have helped remove more than 420,000 Drupella snails from parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
  • The native snails eat living coral tissue and can reproduce rapidly, allowing populations to overwhelm reefs faster than coral can regenerate.
  • Operators on Lady Elliot and Lady Musgrave islands manually remove the snails, while marine scientists warn that unmanaged populations could destroy large coral areas.

They look harmless, but Drupella snails are quietly eating away at Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef. Tourism operators have helped cull more than 420,000 of the native gastropods, which feed on living coral tissue much like crown-of-thorns starfish.

collect as many snails as they can

· Brett LakeyHe described how staff remove Drupella snails during daily island tours.

The snails can grow to about five centimetres long, and outbreaks could destroy entire reefs because they consume coral faster than it can regenerate. Tour guides on Lady Elliot and Lady Musgrave islands are among 26 tourism operators monitoring the populations and removing the animals to protect threatened reefs.

Island staff use elongated tweezers to pull the snails from crevices in the coral. Brett Lakey, owner of Lady Musgrave Experience, said he and his staff “collect as many snails as they can” during daily tours. During one recent two-hour scuba-diving session, staff removed 1,500 snails from the waters around Lady Musgrave Island.

Because they’re not like a fast killer of the corals, or they’re not a fast mover … they’re subtly overlooked.

· Brett LakeyHe explained why the snails can escape attention despite their growing numbers.

Lakey said the snails are easy to overlook because they do not kill coral quickly or move fast. “But they’re definitely out there; they’re definitely increasing,” he said. Staff are finding more of the larger breeding snails in the lagoon.

But they’re definitely out there; they’re definitely increasing. We’re finding more of the bigger ones, that are the breeders, in the lagoon.

· Brett LakeyHe described the rise in Drupella snails around Lady Musgrave Island.

Each female can produce almost 160,000 embryos in a single spawning event. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chief scientist Roger Beeden said the snails can consume an amount of coral roughly equivalent to their own size in a day. Studies show that warmer temperatures increase their consumption rate, while the animals target fast-growing plating and branching corals, where they can hide in small recesses.

They can certainly consume an amount of coral that’s equivalent to about their size, a few centimetres in a day.

· Roger BeedenThe marine authority’s chief scientist warned about the snails’ feeding rate.
About this summary

Originally published by ABC Australia in English. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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