Brett Fitzgerald of the Angler Action Foundation donated an app that allows scientists and volunteers to quickly report snail egg clusters.Įxotic snails get as large as tennis balls, and natives are only as large as golf balls. Therefore, in conjunction with the Snail Kite Coordinating Committee, Audubon’s Everglades Science Coordinator, Paul Gray, PhD, developed a community science project to count snail egg clusters at wetlands across South Florida to determine where snails are and - as importantly - where they are not.
Native snails have not come back, as many expected. Kite recovery is good news but appears almost completely based on the occurrence of exotic snails. Limpkins, another snail specialist, have rebounded as well. Luckily, the kites learned to feed on these invaders, contributing to an unlikely success story where kites have rebounded to approximately 3,000 birds today. These snails grow much larger than our native snails, are more resilient to dry conditions, and can spread rapidly.
The problem? As parts of the Everglades - including Lake Okeechobee and South Florida - went dry, the kites’ only food source, the Florida apple snail, dried out too.Īt the same time, exotic apple snails from South America, presumably from the aquarium trade, got loose and established themselves in Florida lakes and wetlands. After two significant droughts, their numbers plunged from more than 3,000 birds to approximately 700 in just 10 years. The iconic Everglade Snail Kite, which relies on wetland ecosystems like the Everglades, experienced a major population crash in the early 2000s.
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