Word: snails
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...booming, from woman to man, from instinct to rationale, without once adapting a coherent point of view. In time, the narcissistic opus becomes like its author, who ultimately lived down to Katherine Anne Porter's summation. He gives, she said, "the nightmarish impression of the bisexual snail squeezed into its narrow house making love to itself...
...have written to cheer Environment's report on the vast network of conservation commissions in Massachusetts and to protest the possibility of a jetport near Florida's Everglades; they mourned, with TIME, the passing of the golden-cheeked warbler and shuddered at the arrival of the African snail. Other stories on the dangers of nuclear power, overdevelopment in Vermont, noise pollution in big cities, how to abolish billboards, antipollution suits in Illinois drew wide comment. Many readers simply expressed an opinion, as did former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, that "TIME'S concern over the environment...
...opened up by new irrigation systems around Lake Nasser. Without the nutrient-rich silt reaching the Mediterranean, the Egyptian sardine catch declined from 18,000 tons in 1965 to 500 tons in 1968. As a final penalty, irrigation projects on the delta plain have allowed a moisture-loving snail to thrive. Since it carries schistosomiasis, most of the delta people have had that agonizing liver and intestinal disease...
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...