> The snails, which actually grow to about eight inches in length, but can stretch—if nothing else, for headline-writing purposes—to nine inches, have worried Florida authorities since 1969.
Small snails look cute but 8-inch snail sounds a bit scary. Also how do they avoid being eaten by predators if they are slow and vulnerable?
Also I recently saw small slugs which were crawling on the sidewalk along with worms who get to the surface after rain. I wonder what those slugs were planning to do given its middle of October and temperature is merely 10°C (50F)?
I recommend reading accounts of traveling through the Amazon, like The Lost City of Z. The number of pests in rainforests that do horrifying things to the human body is astounding and the botflies are only one of them. Makes me thankful for modern conveniences like pure DEET.
The article only briefly mentions the horrors of rat lungworm, but if you live in a warm, tropical climate where this is prevalent (Hawaii, increasingly Florida) you really want to avoid it.
Apparently there is some evidence that people born in regions where it is more prevalent have some natural resistance.
The main way to get it is accidentally ingesting an infected slug on raw produce, like leafy greens.
We should definitely have a thread about this! But we need to pace our giant snail threads :)
Generally we downweight follow-ups so as to avoid repetition [1, 2]. But once enough time has gone by for the hivemind caches to clear, what is old becomes new again. If you would be willing to email [email protected] in, say, a couple months, we could invite a repost and put it in the SCP [3].
I know people don't want to hear it, but when cooked correctly, wild-caught African land snails are actually delicious. They do take some work to scrub the foot pad, and you want to cook them for a long time to both soften them up, and obviously to ensure there's no parasites left. But in a Ghanaian spinach soup - amazing.
I say wild caught, because farmed snails are fed wilted lettuce, and taste like wilted, rotten lettuce.
That's kind of why I don't really like french snails: it's mostly about the butter, and I don't find eating a chunk of butter to be a pleasant experience really! Give me garlic butter on bread any day instead
It's not the only way the french eat snails though, in the south it's eaten in a tomato sauce (catalan-style as they call it, so probs not just a french thing)
Whelks come to my mind. I like them with ton of mayonnaise but it’s hit or miss. When I get it out of its shell, if it’s take too much time to see it unfold completely, I know I won’t have a pleasant time. You never know what you’ll get with them. Snails are more predictable.
In the south of Spain we eat plenty of snails and they are delicious. Go to Cordoba in May (spring is snail season, in Sevilla and Huelva you'll also find them, but in Córdoba you even have kiosks that in season sell only that) and have some Caracoles with a beer. They're smaller than the French ones and are cooked in minty and gently spiced water. Perfect snack with a very cold beer. As a proper dish or tapa we also eat escargot-like ones (Cabrillas) in a spicy tomato sauce. Also delicious.
Once or twice I’ve enjoyed snails flushed/fed up on green herbs and parsley. They effectively come pre-seasoned. The ones I’ve encountered have been smallish.
I understood it to be more of a finishing feed than a long-term dietary commitment on the part of the snail farmer, but both places I attended have since gone out of business. So maybe the economics are in fact against it…
The first time I learned of these was from the movie "The Naked Prey" where the according to google search,
• He [protagonist] finds a giant African land snail (Lissachatina fulica) crawling on a rock.
• Starving and exhausted, he uses his knife to carve the large mollusk out of its shell and eats the snail meat raw.
• After swallowing it, he comically picks a sharp thorn off a nearby bush to clean his teeth.
I just imagine a field of giant snails approaching me at a glacial pace, all loudly singing "Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve." Nightmare fuel.
The salt river northeast of Phoenix has been infested with apple snails from central america - they get up to 6" or so. The forest service regularly runs events where people in kayaks and on paddle boards help clear that section of river of the clumps of eggs.
One of the world's most 1EET H4X0R5, who hasn't left his parents' basement in 10 years and is rumored to be the operator of 5chan, told me that you can use archive.is to circumvent most paywalls, including that of The Atlantic.
I see what I did there. I mistook the absence of the CSS grey bar, for the complete text of the article. That's on me. You are right, this does not render the entire content visible to me. Were I an AI I'd say something like "you're absolutely right" but I'm not, so I'm going to add a specious double dash -- and slink away.
(sorry. I really did think I was reading the entire piece. It looks like what I see is their occasional seeding of freemium content which is long form and from their back numbers)
Thank you for figuring it out. It is just one more probably necessary step along the long journey to me finally getting an Atlantic subscription. But like every journey, it is not about the destination but the friends we made along the way, as our mutual acquaintance Abraham Lincoln once famously said.
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