Word: snails
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Before flying home from a Hawaiian vacation with his family in 1966, a five-year-old Miami boy packed some unusual souvenirs. Hawaii's pest-control agents waved the lad through Honolulu International Airport-never suspecting that he was lugging three brown-shelled snails. Soon after reaching home, his mother ordered him to toss the creatures into his backyard. What he tossed was an ecological bombshell. Innocently, the boy had introduced into the mainland U.S. a ferociously fertile predator: Achatina fulica, more commonly known as the giant African land snail...
Uphill Fight. North Miamians can no longer walk across their lawns without crunching shells underfoot, and the snail outbreak may get still worse. Endowed with both male and female reproductive organs, the hermaphroditic snail multiplies at a phenomenal rate. In his authoritative study The Giant African Snail, University of Arizona Malacologist Albert R. Mead calculates that a single animal could theoretically produce 8 billion descendants in three years. Such spectacular proliferation requires a huge food supply-for example, Florida's luxuriant cash crops...
...face an uphill fight. Achatina, whose body can grow as long as a foot, has so few natural enemies that it can roam almost anywhere. Plagued by other recent invaders-the Bufo toad from Central America and the Asian walking catfish-Florida biologists are reluctant to import any anti-snail predators, such as the India glowworm, the hermit crab, or even more Bufos, which are known to feed on the young snails. Instead, they have begun careful spraying with insecticide (granules of metaldehyde mixed with tricalcium arsenide). So far, the chemical warfare seems effective. But the snail threat will...
...crucial difference here is that Debussy's sensitivity leads not to sentimentality but to a more pungent commerce with the particulars of the sensible world. This reemergence of intense concern for the small things is a sign of artistic vitality. Compare the above with a line on an injured snail from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis...
Royce Shaw led all scorers with record-setting wins in the mile and the 1000. The lanky junior treated his rivals to a snail's-pace first-quarter in the mile before whirling away from the field at a 3:05 tempo to snap the tape in 4:15, a second in front of Northeastern's Mike Scanlon. With an hour and a half's rest Shaw came back to clip nearly three seconds from the 100 mark. Starting last in the field of six, he took the lead on the second lap and rambled home in 2:11.7 with...