We all know them for moving slowly, always carrying their home on their back. What many of us don't know is that a great number are threatened with extinction. That is why protecting them is the goal of the Salviamo le chiocciole d'Italia project.
Snails take us back to childhood, when many of us enjoyed collecting them and trying to feed them lettuce, or gathering their shells. Now that we are adults, however, we rarely stop to realise that they too need protection. "Every living being deserves to be protected. All animals have equal dignity and are part of the system that includes humans too," recalled Simone Cianfanelli, scientific director of the Salviamo le chiocciole d'Italia project, promoted by the association Friend of the Earth in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of the University of Florence, La Specola.
Salviamo le chiocciole d'Italia is a three-year project launched by the La Specola museum in Florence with the support of Friend of the Earth, a certification programme for products from sustainable farming and agriculture. The goal is to protect two snail species endemic to Tuscany: Xerosecta giustii, a land snail, and Melanopsis etrusca, which lives in thermal waters. Both are gastropod molluscs, included on the Red List of threatened species drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "Animals are part of our history and each one of them is fundamental. If you type the word snails or slugs into any search engine, the first results that come up are methods for getting rid of them. And yet they are food for reptiles, birds and small mammals. And they play an essential role within ecosystems." This is the firm belief of Paolo Bray, founder and director of Friend of the Earth and Friend of the Sea, an equivalent certification programme for sustainable fishing.
Xerosecta giustii is found only in the Colline Metallifere hills of Grosseto province, and its habitat is severely threatened by agriculture. For this reason, the museum's researchers decided to create an ex situ breeding facility (that is, in a location different from the species' place of origin) for this variety of snail at Campagnatico, at the snail farm La lumaca maremmana. The aim is to ensure the continuity of the species while simultaneously studying its biology, which remains poorly understood.
"We tried to recreate the natural habitat of the Xerosecta, transferring clods of soil from the place where they live to the site chosen for the breeding facility," Cianfanelli explains. It was an extremely complex undertaking, requiring lengthy preparation and still demanding constant maintenance. "If a plant species takes over — wild cabbage, for instance — sun exposure is reduced excessively," explains botanist Lorenzo Cecchi. For this reason, the vegetation must be constantly monitored. The shells of the snails — around 500 in total — have been marked in order to track their growth and to distinguish them from newborns.
Melanopsis etrusca lives in watercourses fed by thermal springs, at temperatures ranging between 18 and 44 degrees. This snail has an operculum — a mobile organ with which it can seal the opening of its shell and protect itself from predators. It is found in six locations in the Maremma, including Lago dell'Accesa, and is threatened by the exploitation of spring waters, interventions in river environments and pollution, as well as by the proliferation of thermal spa establishments. Thanks to the Salviamo le chiocciole d'Italia project, a breeding facility for Melanopsis etrusca has been created inside the Aquarium mondo marino in Massa Marittima, which serves as a biological bank for the conservation of the species. This is an entirely innovative undertaking, intended to serve as a model and to be replicated in the future as well.
Friend of the Earth has chosen snails and butterflies for its conservation programmes. They are "iconic" animals, as Paolo Bray put it, often associated with childhood memories and ones that everyone can observe in daily life and rediscover in their beauty and uniqueness. All too often, in fact, people are unaware of all the species with which Italy is so rich: "Protecting them is not a problem, but an opportunity," Cianfanelli reminds us. Tourism, for example, is one of the sectors that benefits most from initiatives such as the one we have just described, because the presence of endemic species increases the value of a territory, and the opportunity to observe them in their habitat and to see first-hand what is being done to protect them holds great appeal. And above all, our country is a global biodiversity hotspot: small and silent, snails too are part of this incredible world.