ABSTRACT
In a single room, tucked away on the main Honolulu campus of the University of Hawai‘i, a group of dedicated people have set up an “ark” – a place of last refuge – for some of the islands’ many highly endangered tree snails. The ark is not a particularly fancy affair. It is comprised of about six “environmental chambers” that look quite a lot like old refrigerators. These units allow staff to control daily temperature, light and “rain” cycles to provide ideal conditions for their slimy inhabitants. Inside each unit are a whole lot of small terrariums – like the kind you might keep a pet rat or fish in – these ones, however, are home to a variety of local snails, and have been filled with the “ōhi‘a and other local vegetation that they would ordinarily live amongst. On a warm January afternoon in 2013 I was lucky enough to get a tour of this facility
from its founder, Professor Mike Hadfield. Amongst the many things that I learned chatting with Mike that afternoon was the fact that these snails don’t actually eat the leaves that they live amongst. Rather, they eat an invisible layer of molds and algae that they scrape off the top of leaves. Consequently, in order to ensure that their charges have a good, balanced, diet, Mike and his team have developed a method of culturing one of these molds on agar in petri dishes to produce little “cakes” that can be used to supplement the fresh vegetation. In addition to the daily maintenance of the facility, every two weeks each of the
terrariums is taken out, its inhabitants carefully counted, and the whole unit disinfected. All in all, keeping snails alive and thriving in a captive ark like this one is hard work, requiring dedicated daily care and an ongoing curiosity about how to make their conditions, and indeed their lives, better. Donna Haraway, the mutual friend who put me in contact with Mike, has written elsewhere about the careful practices that underlie work in this snail program.1 For Haraway, this work is an exemplar of the kind of attentiveness practiced by good biologists – in the field or the lab – that enables them to simultaneously care for the wellbeing of their “critters” and generate reliable data about the world. Here, we see that care,
far from being antithetical to research, might enable new forms of responsiveness – perhaps even “politeness”3-that broaden our sense of what matters to others and consequently enrich our unde rstandings. This is a possibility for people involved in the maintenance of “collections” of all kinds, from galleries and museums to snail arks. My specific interest in this short chapter lies in the way these caring practices might
enable hopes for the future. What kinds of possibilities for the future does the snail ark hold open? But before turning to these more complex questions, it is perhaps necessary to start with
a basic one: why go to all this trouble to keep snails in captivity? The answer is an all too familiar one. As with most captive breeding programs, the snail ark is an effort to hold species that are at the edge of extinction in the world a little longer. In little over a thousand years these snails have gone from having no significant predators at all, into an environment with numerous overlapping threats. First of all came the rats – introduced by Polynesian peoples, but then supplemented with additional species by later European explorers and settlers. Rats can eat a huge number of snails when they put their minds to it, and they have done so in Hawai‘i. In addition to these key predators, over the years Hawai‘i’s endemic tree snails have also had to cope with massive losses of native forest habitat and the introduction of other significant predators, like Jackson’s chameleons (Trioceros jacksonii) from East Africa and a species of larger, carnivorous snail (Euglandina rosea) from North America. While some of Hawai‘i’s snails now hang on in this small ark, they are a tiny fraction of
the islands’ original diversity. An estimated 75 percent of the more than 700 named species have already been lost.4 Of the 43 species in the particular genus of snails on O‘ahu that Mike’s work focuses on (Achatinella), only ten remain – all are federally listed as endangered.
