The Chittenango Ovate Amber Snail is considered the most endangered species in New York state, and Cody Gilbertson, a masters student at SUNY-ESF, is breeding this snail population — which only has about 300 snails — in captivity.

Located in only one region in the world — Chittenango Falls State Park in upstate New York — these snails were being closely monitored through mark-recapture surveys by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) when it was discovered that the population was declining.

USFWS formed a partnership with the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry as well as state parks, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the Rosamond Gifford Zoo and the Seneca Park Zoo to make sure that this species of snail did not go extinct.

These particular land snails are detritivores, meaning they process dead leaves and spread native fungal spores around, which ultimately keeps people from becoming buried alive in the decaying matter that is a natural part of forests, said Rebecca Rundell, the principal investigator of the conservation effort.

“Each time we lose a species from the forest we lose some complexity — our environment becomes homogenized,” Rundell said. “And we can rarely predict the negative consequences of this. We are left with a puzzle that has many missing pieces, all of which are irreplaceable from an evolutionary perspective. They took thousands of years to evolve and we’ll never see them again.”

SUNY-ESF has the only lab in the U.S. that is working on this project. About 20 years ago, another master’s student at SUNY-ESF had attempted a similar experiment on a colony of these snails that were kept at Rosamond Gifford Zoo, Gilbertson said. He was successful in getting the snails to reproduce but the colony did not last in the long-term as many of the hatchings died in captivity. There was an 80 percent mortality rate within the first two weeks.

With the 600 snails that are currently being kept in the SUNY-ESF lab, Gilbertson said the mortality rate is still at virtually zero over three months.

Gilbertson said she wanted to specifically focus on the snails’ diet, so she observed where the snails were found and compared that to her findings from one snail that she studied intensely over the winter. She fed the snail many different leaf species to discover what it liked. That snail grew very well in captivity in comparison to the snails the other student kept about 20 years ago, Gilbertson said. Those snails’ shells cracked or became deformed.

“This diet is providing support for survival of the hatchlings and higher reproduction,” Gilbertson said. “Those two things will help propel the population up and gain security for their overall population.”

After more was learned about the diet of the snail population, Gilbertson said adult snails were brought in to breed and hatch eggs to be kept in special climate-controlled growth chambers that match their environment in the wild.

Rundell said the lab is discovering that there are certain species of dead leaves that the snails seem to grow fastest on, and they are collecting data in several places near Chittenango Falls to better understand the snails’ microhabitat preferences.

Some of the snails were released back into the wild this past Thursday and others will become founders for new populations, Rundell said.

Gilbertson said she hopes the back-up colonies given to Rosamond Gifford Zoo and Seneca Park Zoo can be used to supplement the wild population so that if something happens to the wild population there is a possibility of continuing the population.

She added that she hopes that this conservation effort will be applied to many different conservation efforts across the world since “from invertebrates to mollusks — we can learn from this experience in conservation.”

Gilbertson said a lot of people question why conserving a particular species is important.

“It’s not the one specific species, it’s a collective; it’s the whole picture,” she said. “All those pieces that we’re losing create that picture and we just try to preserve those pieces.”

Published on October 4, 2015 at 9:58 pm

Contact Anjali: acalwis@syr.edu