Word: sciomyzid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
Berg searched scientific literature for earlier reports of such attacks, but apparently no other entomologist had recognized sciomyzid larvae as snail killers. Working with small grants from the National Institutes of Health and later the National Science Foundation, Berg and a handful of graduate students set out to make their own confirmation...
...that an insect introduced to kill a pest may attack friendly insects or even humans. Berg does not believe that the marsh fly-either in its hungry larval stage or as a weak-winged grey or brown adult -poses any threat at all. Unlike the disease-spreading housefly, the sciomyzid avoids human company; its larva is hooked on snails to the exclusion of other food supplies. Says Berg: "Anything which is so highly specialized is not going to change its eating habits and start attacking babies...
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