The Search for the Perfect Snail Snack

The Search for the Perfect Snail Snack 03.26.2026 | News , Places , Wild Life Wild Life 03.26.2026 The Search for the Perfect Snail Snack Hawai‘i’s depleted land snails are eking out an existence in human care. Giving them a brighter future means figuring out what they actually want to eat. Story by Lela Nargi Share For generations, Hawaiians hiked up the lush, towering peaks of O‘ahu to harvest snail shells. Over 759 native species inhabited the Hawaiian archipelago, and their shells—empty after the animals died—were littered among the bright ko’oloa’ula flowers atop O‘ahu’s cliffside forests. Speckled or striped, pale or vivid, long or squat, ranging in size from 2 to 22 millimeters, the shells were strung into leis and bracelets, a testament to their beauty and bounty. Hawai’i’s ground- and tree-dwelling snails were once so abundant that John Thomas Gulick, a 19th-century missionary and naturalist, reportedly collected more than 44,000 live snails in just three years . Today, things are different. “I haven’t seen 40,000 snails alive in my lifetime,” says Kenneth Hayes, a snail conservation biologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Pressured by habitat loss and invasions by non-native species, more than half of Hawai’i’s terrestrial snail species have been extinguished; those that remain cling on in such small numbers that one particularly nasty storm could wipe them out forever. In fact, 100 more of these distinctive snail species are in danger of going extinct in the next decade, according to Hayes. To try to stanch Hawai’i’s precipitous gastropod decline, Hayes is working alongside researchers at the University of Hawai’i, the Honolulu Zoo, and various government agencies, on the Snail Extinction Prevention Program (SEPP) . Their goal is to pull some 60 species of ground- and tree-dwelling snails back from the brink of extinction through a captive breeding program. After more than a decade of work, SEPP team members are still struggling with one of the most fundamental snags in conservation biology: They’re not sure exactly what their animals eat. They are, however, inching closer to an answer. Left to their own devices, Hawai’i’s terrestrial snails seek sustenance on a variety of plants and trees. ‘Ōhi‘a lehua , a common tree with a bright flower like a tassel, is a favorite, as is kanawao, a hydrangea relative with sharp-edged leaves. Three types of nettles are also popular. But it’s not usually the foliage the snails are after. Instead, says Solomon Champion, SEPP’s snail diet research specialist, the snails use their rake-like tongues to scrape microbes off the leaves. “They’ll essentially do a window cleaning on the surface,” Champion says. To keep their captive snails fed, the SEPP team helicopters to Hawai’i’s high-altitude native forests to source leaves. The process is labor-intensive and expensive, and it restricts who can raise captive snails to those local enough to receive shipments of fresh flora. Bringing in wild foliage can