Feral Cities (5 page)

Omar Garcia is the man overseeing the cleanup. In the past week they've found a couple hundred giant African land snails in the area, he says. “We've just turned up, so you've got snails hibernating that are coming up as we agitate the ground and stuff like that. A lot at all stages: neonates, baby size to adult size.” A couple hundred is an improvement. “I remember we found over seven hundred snails on one property when I first started doing this in November 2011,” he says.

“There's one here, Tristan,” calls Alex, who has been rooting through the front yard of the house. “Not that it's going to run away.”

Omar offers me a glove so I can join the snail hunt: “One glove enough?”

I think for a second and then my brain screams,
“Rat lungworm.”
“Er … I'll go for two, actually.”

We search through the leaf litter, pulling back bushes, finding snail after snail. We pry them off leaves, haul them out of the
soil, and pick them from walls, dropping them into clear resealable plastic bags as we go. They may be the stuff of nightmares, but here—dead and dying in their rock-hard vertical brown-striped shells—it's hard to think of them as the terrors they are.

Miami has been here before, says Mark. “The original infestation was back in 1966 in North Miami where I grew up. A little boy brought back three snails from Hawaii, where they are pretty much endemic. He put them in his pockets, got home, put them in a terrarium and, lo and behold, a month later there's hundreds of eggs. So grandma said let's get rid of these eggs and tossed them out the back, not realizing what could happen.”

Two years later the North Miami authorities discovered the snails and called in the Florida Department of Agriculture to eradicate them. It took four years and produced a haul of around eighteen thousand snails. This outbreak is far more serious. “It's much more widespread,” says Mark. “We've done 137,000 in just over two years whereas they collected 18,000 in four years in the late '60s and early '70s.”

The current outbreak came to light on September 8, 2011. One of the department's fruit fly trappers was changing a trap on a house shared by two Cuban sisters on Thirty-Third Avenue in the Coral Way neighborhood. They asked if he could also help with their snail problem. “They had snails on the walls, snails in plants, snails in trees. The snails were everywhere,” says Mark.

The giant African land snail was on a watch list of potential threats, so the fruit fly trapper grabbed a few and sent them up to the department's resident snail expert, who confirmed that same day they were indeed giant African land snails. The following morning, the department descended on the area en masse, sending in every one of its fifty-odd South Florida inspectors to hunt for snails. In house after house, they found snails by the hundreds.

The area became known as Core 1, a mile-radius zone around the Cuban sisters' home. It was the ground zero of the second snail invasion of Miami. By the end of the year, fourteen outbreak zones
had been found throughout the city from Little Haiti and Hialeah to Coral Gables and South Miami Heights. By the start of 2014, twenty-five cores had been discovered.

How the snails got into Miami this time isn't known, but the leading theory is that they were brought there for use in Santería or, most likely, Yorùbá rituals. Yorùbá is one of the traditional religions of Nigeria, the native home to the giant African land snail. The mollusk has a starring role in the faith's creation story. The gist is that the deity Obàtálá used a snail shell filled with loose earth to transform the world from marsh to solid land. Fittingly, he used a chicken to spread the earth around the world.

When Yorùbá believers were brought as slaves to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean, the slave masters banned them from practicing the religion and insisted they follow Catholicism instead. The result of this forced merger of Yorùbá and Catholicism was Santería. “In the practice of Santería, snails are an important part,” says Mark. “They foretell your health, spirituality, and prosperity. But there were no giant African land snails in Cuba, so the Yorùbá practitioners and the Santería practitioners used any common snail that was available. But stricter Yorùbá practitioners use giant African land snails, so there is a theory that Yorùbá practitioners may have brought these in and they got out of control.”

There are precedents that support the theory. US Customs and Border Protection once caught a woman coming back from Nigeria at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport who had snails hidden under her dress. Another time a man stopped at LAX was found to have giant African land snails lurking in every pocket of his suit.

In Miami itself, police launched an investigation in 2010 into a Yorùbá practitioner who had convinced his followers that the snails could cure them of their aliments. He held the creatures of over their heads and then cut them so his followers could drink the “curative” mucus. The police got involved after the snail juice drinkers began complaining of violent illness.

It's unlikely, however, that the original source of the current outbreak will ever be conclusively determined. “We would certainly like to say here's definitively how they got here, but in reality we will probably never know,” says Mark.

Despite the large scale of the outbreak, Mark is confident the snails will be eradicated. The department's fast reaction and a major billboard campaign urging people to “Look for it! Report it!” seems to be paying dividends. The rate at which new cores are being found has slowed dramatically, and the newest sites seem to have far fewer snails within them. In the meantime, the department is preparing to bring in its latest weapon against the snails: Labradors trained to sniff out snails hidden in the undergrowth that human eyes may miss.

“The awareness campaign means we are getting to them sooner, before they are able to establish a huge population,” says Mark. “The idea is we need to get to the point where we are not finding any more snails, dead or alive. Then we still have to go two more years of continuing to survey before we ask for a declaration of eradication. But there's no question that we will reach that point.”

Miami is something of a hub for exotic animals. Its tropical monsoon climate ensures that almost anything that gets there and manages to breed will survive. “We've got everything,” says Alex. “You name it, we've got it. Just like our culture.”

Some, like the giant African land snails, are met with a ferocious crackdown, but others become so established there's little choice but to accept them, and this is what has happened with the iguanas. These lizards, with their outlandish Mohawk-like spines running down their backs, are a common sight in Miami. They especially like the canals. Take a trip along North Okeechobee Road and you can see dozens of them sunning themselves on the banks of the Miami Canal. “They love the canal banks,” says Alex as we drive past. “Who goes out to a canal bank? Nobody. So it gives them a green corridor to go up and down.”

Most of the iguanas we see lurking on the canal banks are green iguanas, which can grow to six feet long, but there are other types of iguanas in the city too, including the black-and-white-colored Mexican spinytail iguana. “They are not dangerous to humans, but the problem with them is they eat flowers,” says Alex. “We have a wonderful botanic garden, which is beautiful and world-renowned, but it's challenged because the iguanas go in there and take care of all the buds.”

Like the snails and the chickens, people brought the iguanas to the city. “Some were escaped pets, but most came from our old zoo,” says Alex. “We had this little zoo out on Key Biscayne, Crandon Park Zoo, and they had iguanas roaming around. The zoo moved and when they left, the problem spread out and they took over the city.”

Today iguanas are so widespread in Miami that people pretty much ignore them. “They are just kind of accepted. A lot of people don't even know that they are not native. They poop and people don't like to look at them, but you can't get rid of them. And when you have pythons to worry about, iguanas are low on the food chain.”

Ah, yes, the snakes. The Miami metropolitan area is home to increasing numbers of boas and pythons, which vie with giant African land snails for the title of animal enemy number one. Just a few weeks before my visit, a man in Hialeah discovered a thirteen-foot albino Burmese python living under his shed. Shortly after, a ten-foot-long rock python strangled a sixty-pound Siberian husky to death in a backyard, despite the dog owner's frantic attempts to kill the snake with a pair of garden scissors.

Mercifully, attacks on dogs, let alone people, are rare. But the risk is real, so local agencies and biologists have banded together to form the Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, or ECISMA for short. Its mission is wide-ranging. Members patrol for giant African land snails in city parks and battle with the mile-a-minute vine, a fast-growing invasive plant with barbed tendrils that smothers rival vegetation.

Another ECISMA project focuses on the boa constrictors living on the 444-acre Deering Estate in Cutler, fifteen miles south of downtown Miami. Boas have been breeding in Miami since the early 1990s, and ECISMA is trying to learn more about their behavior. To do this they have surgically implanted tracking devices into two boas on the estate—one male, one female.

I meet up with Dallas Hazelton, preserve manager at the estate, and Miami-Dade Parks and Recreation's Jane Griffin Dozier, who are both involved in the boa tracking work. The problem with the boas, they tell me, is that they pose a threat to south Florida's native wildlife, including animals living in the Everglades.

Like the iguanas, the boas came to Miami as pets, says Dallas: “My records of boas only goes back to 1999, but there are undocumented reports of boas dating back to the '70s. At some point it must have been a release or escape. This is the only known breeding population of boas in the United States.”

They offer to show me the female boa, so we head into the estate through a gated entrance off Southwest 152nd Street. As we drive in along a bumpy track, I notice that there are homes all along the estate boundary. Dallas says the boas have troubled the residents from time to time. “We had an unfortunate incident a couple of years ago,” he says. “There was a neighbor over here, and one of the guards found this dead big tomcat and a dead boa lying right next to each other. The boa had strangled the cat, but in the process the cat had bit up the snake so bad that it died from its wounds.

“The neighbor was putting up signs with a picture saying ‘Here's my missing cat, call us if you find him.' Someone had to call her to tell her. She was very upset.”

We drive deeper into the forest, the road bordered on either side by dense vegetation punctuated by spindly paurotis palm trees. We stop close to the boa's last recorded location. Jane opens the trunk of the truck and pulls out a large electronic box and a handheld aerial, not unlike an old-fashioned rooftop TV aerial. She plugs the
aerial into the box, holds the aerial up, and twists a dial on the box. She turns to face the tangle of bushes and the box goes
bip, bip, bip.
“This way,” she says.

We follow her into the forest, fighting with vines that snag our feet as we push through the foliage.
Bip, bip, bip
goes the tracker. We press deeper and deeper into the undergrowth, dodging poison ivy as we go. The bip, bip,
bip
of the tracker seems to get louder with every step.

Adrian Diaz, the Miami-Dade County Animal Services investigator who is with us, asks Dallas if he can pick up the snake when we find her. “No, we don't want to disturb them. We want them to go about much as they naturally do. We don't touch them,” says Dallas.

Adrian looks a little disappointed. On the way here he was telling me about his lifelong love of snakes. “As a kid I was never afraid to catch the little corn snakes and garden snakes. Never been afraid—there's just something about them,” he explained. “At one point I had them at home and everything. I had a blood python, two Burmese pythons, green tree boas, all sorts of stuff. My wife obviously put an end to that quick.”

Bip-bip-bip.
It's definitely getting louder.

Around this point it strikes me that before this moment I've never seen a snake outside a zoo. My encounter with the Phoenix rattlesnake is yet to come. I vaguely remember seeing a tail of an adder, Britain's only venomous snake, disappearing into a bush as a kid—or, at least, I think I saw it. In fact, thinking about it again, I was probably just told there were adders there and imagined the rest.

Besides, adders are cowardly snakes, more likely to flee before you find them than bite. Now I'm about to come face-to-face with a wild boa constrictor. I hope I don't panic.

Bip-bip-bip.
It's definitely louder.
Bip-bip-bip.
And more frequent. It's starting to feel like the scene in the movie
Alien
where they search the spaceship for the monster using motion trackers. I glance
at the palm trees. What if it's in a tree? Boas are capable climbers, I think to myself.