Two undergraduate researchers have recently discovered the New Zealand mud snail in the state of Michigan. Initially, state experts believed that the snail population was small, and located in only one region in the state of Michigan. However, the snail has been found in multiple rivers, so the snails are more prevalent than the officials had initially thought. But what is so bad about these snails?
The mud snail is a tiny snail that is often mistaken for a spot of mud. The snail often hooks itself onto fishing gear or other sorts of outdoor equipment and then proceeds to hitch a ride to new environments. Since mud snails hitchhike on people’s outdoor objects, you can understand how quickly and easily these snails can take over large areas of land.
Residents of Michigan, and surrounding territories, are worried that the invasive mud snail will repeat the horrors that the zebra mussel brought to Michigan in the late eighties. Hopefully the mud snail won’t cause power plants to shut down, or water supply systems to come to a halt, or cause half a billion dollars in damages, like the zebra mussel did almost thirty years ago.
Do you think that the New Zealand mud snail could potentially be an even greater disaster to the ecosystem than the zebra mussel?
