Rare Snail Captured on Camera for the First Time Laying an Egg Through Its Neck
A rare New Zealand snail had been captured on video for the first time laying an egg from its neck
The Powelliphanta augusta snail was undergoing a routine weight check when the egg appeared
The snail species lays roughly five eggs a year, which can take over a year to hatchWhat came first, the snail or the egg?
New footage of a rare New Zealand snail laying an egg from its neck for the first time is now picking up steam online, and it's not happening at a snail's pace. The clip, shared by CBS News and The Guardian, shows a Powelliphanta augusta snail pushing a tiny egg from the neck of its body. Animal experts who witnessed the moment in person and New Zealand's Department of Conservation are calling the moment "quite remarkable."
"In all the years we've been doing that [work], we've never encountered it," Ingrid Gruner, the regional biodiversity liaison of the department, told The Guardian.
Gruner, per the outlet, helps manage a captivity program for the Powelliphanta augusta snails — otherwise known as the Mount Augustus snail — launched nearly 20 years ago. Experts with the program were weighing the egg-laying snail as part of a routine weight check when the creature started pushing the egg out of its neck.
Gruner told The Guardian that the team "struck lucky" and captured the moment on camera.
The snails lay roughly five eggs annually, which can take longer than a year to hatch, per a news release.
Senior science advisor for New Zealand's conservation department, Kath Walker, noted in the release that snails have a genital pore on their necks to mate while remaining in their shells. According to The Guardian, other snails mate or lay eggs similarly, with some species even birthing live young.
"It extends its penis out of this pore and into its mate's pore, and its mate does the same, simultaneously exchanging sperm, which they can store until they each fertilize the sperm they've received to create eggs," Walker said of the Powelliphanta augusta snail's procreation methods. "As hermaphrodites, they have both male and female genitalia, so although they usually mate with another to cross-fertilize their eggs, as carnivores which have to live at relatively low density, being able to occasionally self-fertilize must help with the survival of the species."
Following a mining proposal in 2006 for the Mt Augustus ridge line on South Island — which The Guardian reports as the snail's sole native habitat — scientists have since been managing the critter's population. At the time, 2,000 snails were used to start a captive colony, while 4,000 were transferred to areas nearby. Faulty temperature controls of a department refrigerator led to roughly 800 of the snails dying in 2011.
According to The Guardian, as of March, 1,884 snails (hatchlings to adults) and 2,195 eggs were in the captive breeding program. New colonies in the wild have since been established, and the department is monitoring them.
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"It's remarkable that in all the time we've spent caring for the snails, this is the first time we've seen one lay an egg. We caught the action when we were weighing the snail. We turned it over to be weighed and saw the egg just starting to emerge from the snail," Lisa Flanagan, who has worked with the snails for over 12 years, said.
"Some of our captive snails are between 25 and 30 years old," Flanagan added of the snails, which take eight years to reach sexual maturity. "They're polar opposites to the pest garden snail we introduced to New Zealand, which is like a weed, with thousands of offspring each year and a short life."
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