Powelliphanta snail seekers wanted
DOC ranger Selena Brown is seeking snail seekers. Photo: Neil Wilson.
DOC ranger Selena Brown is looking for three to five outdoorsy people “with good knees, a sense of humour and interesting stories” who would like to go out on “snailing trips”.
Selena is organising the Powelliphanta snail-monitoring project out of the Takaka DOC office. The volunteer helpers need good knees, she says, because of the time they will spend on all fours looking for snails.
“The interesting stories and the sense of humour will help to make the snailing trips more enjoyable.”
This year is year seven of a 10-year recovery plan for the Powelliphanta snails. “They were identified as being part of an ecosystem that’s not so healthy, so the recovery plan is like humans giving them a hand-up.”
The monitoring project takes place at a range of locations in the Bay. Some of them, like the one at Mangarakau Swamp, can be easily reached from a car park. The one on the track to Boulder Lake, on the other hand, is “on rough ground amongst extreme limestone formations, and very full on,” she says. People volunteering to be part of the team need to be able to cope with a range of terrains and conditions.
Powelliphanta species are said to be between two and five million years old—about the same vintage as tuatara. In our region they are mostly found on land inside one of the national parks, but there is one population on private land at Paturau.
“That landowner, Lone Star Farms, has put a covenant on a little patch of land there and built a predator-proof fence to keep the rats and hedgehogs out. That population, of an extremely rare kind of Powelliphanta, is being well looked-after.”
The monitoring sites are visited every two years in the same month. Live snails and predated shells are recorded, including the type of predator responsible for the deaths. It is hoped that the monitoring will record increases in the populations of snails, but there is no clear trend yet.
“Possums, rats, pigs, hedgehogs and thrushes all eat snails, and they all have different ways of getting the snail out of the shell. For example, possums have to learn the technique of working a piece of shell loose in just the right place, like the tear tab on a can. Unfortunately, once some of them find the way, the word gets around.”
Selena says that the basic bottom line in all this work is “trying to keep the whole ecosystem healthy. Nothing happens in isolation. The snail monitoring provides data about the success of predator control programmes, among other things.”
Anyone interested in more information about volunteering should contact Selena at the Takaka field office, ph 525 8026.
Neil Wilson
