In the rainy season, early mornings find me in the garden harvesting that most prolific of monsoon crops -– the garden snail. I’m a live-and-let-live creature most of the time, but my proximity to the jungle and the wet conditions bring forth Helix aspersa in legions. They chew holes in my tender heliconia leaves and devour infant seedlings overnight. So my garden is a Zero Tolerance Zone.
The garden snail seems to be one of those rare animals that has no natural enemies. I was told that ducks would eat them but when I offered some to my flock of Muscovies, they recoiled in horror. Rama the Bald Parrot, a sometime carnivore, flung a proffered snail from his cage in disgust. What was I to do with them all? Some mornings I was gathering a kilogram or more. I noticed that they liked to congregate in certain parts of the garden and left other areas severely alone. Likewise, they preferred certain plants. I’ve seen up to ten on a single papaya trunk, evidently holding an important meeting. They like to hang out on the underside of keladi leaves, they favour banana and ginger plants and also enjoy a foray into my precious mulberry trees. So on misty mornings I wander through the dripping leaves, plucking slimy gastropods from the greenery until my bucket runneth over.
When I go off to answer the phone, I return to find my prey escaping in all directions. According to the literature, the fastest are the speckled garden snails which can move several yards per hour compared with 23 inches per hour for most other land snails. The world record for speed seems to be held by a garden snail named Archie, who covered a 13 inch course in 2 minutes at the 1995 World Snail Racing Championships held in Longhan, England. No matter what speed they’re moving at, snails leave a telltale track of gleaming silver behind them so they are easy to recapture. The thick slime they produce allows them to crawl along the edge of a razor without harm, should they wish to, and creates a suction that lets them travel upside down. Many land snails can lift ten times their own weight up a vertical surface. So they do have a few tricks.
At first I would reluctantly consign my daily catch to the liquid manure barrel (with a prayer for their rebirth as bees or butterflies) and truly they did not seem to suffer as they became part of the compost cycle, but the layer of snail shells became unwieldy. For a time I cast them up onto the thick wilderness of flowering vines on top of the parking garage until I noticed them sneaking back into the garden on damp nights. Since then I take them across the road to a patch of wilderness, but suspect they make a run for it back to my yard when I’m asleep.
For a few weeks before Christmas they held shameless orgies on the grass. Snails are hermaphrodites, which means that they have both male and female reproductive organs. What does a hermaphrodite look for in a mate, I wonder? Snails have very poor eyesight and cannot hear, so how do they find each other? Perhaps they just bump into one another while consuming my heritage vegetable seedlings. When they do locate a particularly attractive partner, a white (ahem) organ appears from both and pierces the slimy body of the other. Then they just lay around for hours on the grass like that in broad daylight; it’s a scandal. I’m told that prior to reproduction, most land snails perform a ritual courtship before mating that can last anywhere from two and twelve hours but have not seen this. Prolific breeders, each snail may bury up to 100 fertilized eggs every month. No wonder there are so many of them. Quite a lot of these amorous couples went to Snail Heaven together in my compost bucket, but it didn’t have an appreciable effect on the population. They keep on coming, remorselessly sliding up trees and under leaves and across the grass.
Wayan Manis took a big bag of them to a friend once, but there were no repeat orders. Presumably these are the escargot esteemed by gourmet diners; people have been eating freshwater snails and land snails since prehistoric times. Today they are still regarded as a delicacy in many countries. The market supply comes largely from snails that are raised in captivity on special farms in southern France, Italy, and Spain. Maggie from Nyuh Kuning tried to follow the classical French technique of feeding the creatures bran or corn meal for a couple of days before cooking, but they all up and died. I’m told there’s a seasoning paste made of fermented garden snails in East Bali, and I’m happy to supply the raw material to any entrepreneurs desirous of setting themselves up in this business, absolutely free of charge.
Locally, some people do relish a dish of snails. Several hundred snails were found in a car in Sanur where they were escaping from the recent floods, and a Balinese acquaintance cooked them up for her family. Here’s the recipe –- tip the snails into boiling water to kill them, then extract them from the shells and cut off the black tail. Simmer them with Balinese bumbu until tender and enjoy. You can have my share. The largest land snail ever found was 15 inches long and weighed 2 pounds, enough to feed an entire compound.
When not being harassed by murderous gardeners, a Helix garden snail will live for up to three years. Some of the big African species live for much longer and snails in captivity enjoy a lifespan of ten to fifteen years. This begs the question of why anyone would keep a snail, arguably low on the personality scale, as a pet. It does indeed take all kinds to make a world.
Without vision or hearing and presumably not much in the way of thinking equipment the Helix snail travels around aimlessly all night, often going around in complete circles. They rely mainly on their sense of touch to locate my tender seedlings, decaying leaves, fungi, cardboard and other food. A few types are carnivorous and even cannibalistic.
There are between 50,000 and 200,000 mollusc species alive in the world today. Many species have yet to be discovered and many recently discovered species are yet to be identified and named. Perhaps mine fall into that category, and will someday be known as Helix bewareofibukatoftebesaya.
