Snails

The greatest threat to the rice crop is the apple snail, an unwelcome foreign creature,originating from Brazil, that can devastate a field. The telltale red eggs line the canals and are found on young plants. We try to remove these by hand and squish them before they hatch. Red splotches dot the pavement in the village. Once hatched, the small snails eat voraciously, consuming entire bunches of green tender rice stalks. Children are usually paid to collect the snails in buckets, a few yen per snail, then the snails are left on the road to be run over by the cars.

One would think there is a better way to get rid of them but more crunchy squishy stuff on the road is a reminder of the menace. These days, kids are not too enthused about this chore - they get money from their grandparents and don't need to earn a few yen by slogging through leech-ridden mud in the hot sun to collect disgusting snails. Farmers end up doing this themselves.

The only natural predator of the apple snail is the crocodile - so the village determined that was not a solution! There is a vegetable based oil that seems to kill the eggs, so this solution has been added to the canals over the past couple of years and the problem seems to be much less than before. A few years ago we would gather a couple buckets a day of snails but now, there are few.