🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, NOT ALL HUMANS ARE PREDATORS. Actually it may only be a minority
who are, so we must isolate them, punish them--and remove them from
power where applicable.

This man wants to save the snail against man-made pollution. Perhaps
this is the kind of people we need in power...;)

At One With the Snails

Sat Oct 30, 7:55 AM ET   Top Stories - Los Angeles Times 
 
By P.J. Huffstutter Times Staff Writer 

PROTEM, Mo.-- More than 170 feet below the surface, Tom Aley feels his
way through a pitch-black cave, searching for a blind snail no bigger
than a grain of sand.

The air is dank and cold. Aley squeezes his 6-foot-3, 195-pound frame
through a gap in the stone just wider than his thighs. Far ahead, he
can hear the faint sound of water trickling through the cave, which
stretches out for two miles. It's the underground creek that winds
through Tumbling Creek Cave, buried deep in the lush rolling hills of
southwest Missouri.

Along the creek, inside this cave he owns, Aley discovered what has
become his obsession: the snail called Antrobia culveri.

There is nothing else like it-- it is the only species in its genus
and so far, it has been seen only in this cave.

About 15,000 Antrobia culveri once flourished here. Today, fewer than
150 are left: Runoff from overgrazed pastures has washed sediment and
pollution into the creek's once icy clear waters, and is thought to
have killed off nearly all the snails.

Aley's attempts to keep this seemingly insignificant creature alive
destroyed his first marriage, cost him $1.4 million and consumed 38
years of his life. The dwindling snail population exasperates him --he
sees it as a personal failure-- but Aley refuses to stop.

[url]http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=6&u=/latimests/20041030/ts_latimes/atonewiththesnails[/url]