Lonely George the tree snail dies, and a species goes extinct
THE WORLD’S LONELIEST snail is no more.
George, a Hawaiian tree snail—and the last known member of the species Achatinella apexfulva—died on New Year’s Day. He was 14, which is quite old for a snail of his kind.
George was born in a captive breeding facility at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in the early 2000s, and soon after, the rest of his kin died. That’s when he got his name—after Lonesome George, the Pinta Island tortoise who was also the last of his kind.
For over a decade, researchers searched in vain for another member of the species for George to mate with, to no avail. (Though these snails are hermaphrodites, two adults must mate to produce offspring, and researchers refer to George as a “he.”)
“I’m sad, but really, I’m more angry because this was such a special species, and so few people knew about it,” says Rebecca Rundell, an evolutionary biologist with State University of New York who used to help care for George and his kin.
Throughout his life, George was a public face for the struggles facing Hawaiian land snails. His death highlights both the vast diversity of indigenous snails—and their desperate plight.
“I know it’s just a snail, but it represents a lot more,” says David Sischo, a wildlife biologist with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources and coordinator of the Snail Extinction Prevention Program.
Silencing the forest
Snails were once incredibly numerous in Hawaii, and the loss of a species is a blow to the ecosystem. Records from the 19th century claim that 10,000 or more shells could be collected in a single day. “Anything that is abundant in the forest is an integral part of it,” says Michael Hadfield, an invertebrate biologist who ran the captive breeding program for rare native Hawaiian snails until the late 2000s.
And these creatures are incredibly diverse: There were once more than 750 species of land snail in Hawaii, including a little over 200 in the tree snail family.
When they arrived on the islands, the snails branched out and took on a variety of ecological roles. Some of these species came to function as decomposers—like earthworms, which are not native to the islands—and fulfill the essential ecological role of breaking down detritus.
The Hawaiian tree snails specialize on the gunk that grows on leaves. Upon feeding, they reduce the abundance of fungi on leaves while increasing fungal diversity—and because of that, they may have helped protect their host trees from diseases. Some biologists think healthy snail populations could have prevented the current outbreak of Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death, a new fungal pathogen wiping out native trees.
