Florida officials plan to combat the ultra-invasive Giant African Land Snail with Labrador retrievers.
The troublesome mollusks have taken Miami by storm, after only having been spotted two years ago by a surprised home owner, Reuters reported via MSN.
The monster snails can grow as big as a rat; they destroy plants, stucco, and plaster in their wake. In large numbers they can cause immense structural damage to buildings, as they search for calcium to grow their shockingly-large shells.
"We see a lot of strange things in Florida and this one makes the top of the list," Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam told Reuters. "It is a very serious pest."
Through an "aggressive termination campaign," Florida officials have already removed 128,000 of the critters. Now they're hoping a bunch of dogs will help them capture even more of the house-hungry snails.
Canines will be trained to sniff out the rest of the snails.
"They're very good at detecting the Giant African Land Snail," Richard Gaskalla, the head of plant industry at the Florida Agriculture Department, told Reuters. "So we're building four-legged technology into this program as quickly as we can."
A black lab, named Bear, has almost completed training and will soon be ready to battle the snails. Two other labs are expected to begin the three-month training program in the near future.
The snail has no natural predators in Miami, so officials need as much help as possible in eradicating the pests that have already cost the county $6 million.
Destroying houses is not the only unsavory trait the mollusks possess. They carry the rat lungworm, a nasty parasite that can cause illness in humans, and even forms of meningitis (although no cases have been reported in the U.S. so far).
A team of 45 people regularly hunt down the snails, and have even been known to knock them off walls with rakes or pull them from the ground with their bare hands. They also use chemicals and "experimental traps."
The efforts seem to be paying off, recently there has been a drastic decline in the Giant African Land Snail population.
"The number of detections this last year were in the thousands; now they are down to around 200 to 300 a week," Gaskalla said.
