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raising them, thinking that they are pets. You have some who don’t care until it becomes a nuisance, and others who think that we’re crazy because we are messing with the chickens. So right now we’re just keeping people quiet by addressing those chickens that make a lot of noise.”
    â€œIn other words,” Jill interjects, “we’re putting a Band-Aid on the wound.”

    Miami may have a love-hate relationship with its urban poultry, but there’s another religious import that is proving a universally unwelcome addition to the city’s fauna: the giant African land snail. They might be slow but they are the stuff of nightmares. Fully grown, these gastropods measure eight inches long and boast an insatiable appetite for calcium that means they will happily eat the stucco walls and plaster of your home.
    Giant house-eating snails would be bad enough but, explains Mark Fagan of the Florida Department of Agriculture, it gets worse. “By the time they are six months old, they start laying a hundred eggs a month,” he tells me. They are also hermaphrodites—both male and female at the same time—and capable of impregnating themselves if the mood takes them.
    OK, so they are giant hermaphrodite house-eating snails that breed fast. No, says Mark, it’s worse than that. “It’s also a human and animal health threat. We have confirmation from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta of the presence of
Angiostrongylus cantonensis
in them. That’s rat lungworm disease.”
    I don’t know what rat lungworm disease is, but it sounds terrifying. It doesn’t take long for Mark to enlighten me. “It’s found in the feces of rats. The snail will consume the feces, and in it is a tiny parasitic nematode that begins its life in the snail, eventually emerging as an adult in the slime of the snail. That’s why we tell people
do not
pick up snails with your bare hands—always use some kind of plastic or latex glove because that tiny little nematode, youare not going to see it. And what do we all do in Florida on hot humid days like today? We wipe the sweat from around our eyes and our mouth. Do that and you’ve just introduced the worm into your body.”
    I ask what happens next, but I don’t think I want to know. “That worm will make its way to the bloodstream, eventually making its way up to the meninges, the protective membranes covering up the brain. At which point it will expire, and that could cause a rare form of meningitis known as eosinophilic meningitis.
    â€œThere’s no cure for it,” he adds. “Some people recover on their own. Others have to be hospitalized. It all depends on your own health status. But it can also cause other neurological issues like blindness, deafness, loss of gait, inability to perform normal everyday duties. That’s why it’s such a danger.”
    So far the only confirmed victim has been a dog in Kendall. “It was a very heavily infested property, and the dog was diagnosed by the veterinarian as having eosinophilic meningitis. What we believe is the dog got curious about a snail, was sniffing it, and got a nematode in its nose.”
    So we’re dealing with giant potentially deadly hermaphrodite house-eating snails that breed fast. Nope, it gets worse. It turns out they are a threat not just to residents of Miami but also to Florida’s economy and the national security of the entire United States. “They eat five hundred different crop plants, and that includes everything we grow in the state of Florida,” says Mark. “We provide this nation’s food from October through May. When you think of Florida, you think of sandy beaches, swaying palms, and Mickey Mouse ears. You don’t think of agriculture, but agriculture is second only to tourism economically. This snail threatens Florida’s agriculture. It can doom it, put an end to it.”
    In