Word: larvae
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Most promising of the snail hunters is one of the world's messiest killers, a blind, translucent larva that is the aquatic young of a sciomyzid marsh fly. No species is more than three-quarters of an inch long, but they tear into the snails that are their natural prey with fierce abandon, ripping their flesh to ribbons with sharp mouth hooks...
Tundra Killer. Berg discovered the sciomyzid's taste for snails quite by accident. While doing research in Alaska on mosquito control, he occasionally dipped sciomyzid larvae from tundra pools. One afternoon he happened to put a single larva into a dish along with five snails. Half an hour later, he had a chilling surprise: "I saw the larva with its head thrust into the opening of a snail shell, its mouth hooks working. When I came back the next morning, the larva had pulled out, but half the soft parts of the snail were gone...
...says, "we have reared 105 species, and every one we have found is either a snail killer or a slug killer." Some of the larvae will kill only one particular species of snail; others eagerly attack almost any snail up to 19 times their own weight. Many scio-myzids are death for two of the three types of snails that carry schistosomiasis. The third snail host, prevalent in Formosa and the Philippines, has a limestone trap door inside its shell that mangles the attacking larva...
Cause of all the trouble is a wiggly tailed, microscopic larva that lives out its life as an unwelcome hitchhiker in both snails* and man. Hatched in fresh water, the schistosomal larva must invade a snail within about 24 hours or die. After weeks of development and change in the snail, the larvae move on and burrow into a human body, where they mature and mate in the bloodstream. Then they settle down to years devoted to depositing eggs in vital organs. The adult parasites live in an almost constant state of copulation and the female can produce...
Eradication of parasite-bearing snails is not one bit easier than attacking the worms in man. The snails have survived the assaults of modern chemistry, and they thrive on the benefits of modern engineering-each new irrigation system, each new dam provides more breeding places. Victims pick up the larva in snail-infested paddyfields and irrigated patches where they work, drink and wash clothes. During the occupation of Japan, the U.S. Army drastically reduced the incidence of the disease by killing snails with the chemical sodium pentachlorphenate, but like so many other chemical agents, the stuff also killed fish...