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conclusion, what Miami is facing are giant potentially deadly hermaphrodite house-eating
terrorist
snails that breed fast. No wonder their arrival sparked the biggest pest control operation in the history of the Florida Department of Agriculture. Miami is thefront line, and if the snails escape the city and make it into the Everglades and the farmlands, they may become unstoppable.
    Mark invites me to come see the war against the snails firsthand at the latest outbreak zone. I head there with Alex Muñoz, director of Miami-Dade County Animal Services. On the way there the threat of rat lungworm plays on our minds. “I’m used to the native animals, whether it’s sharks, manatees, alligators, crocodiles, but this …” he says, lost for words.
    The latest hotspot is in Little Haiti, and as we arrive we watch a team member carrying a clear plastic bag full of snails greet a passing colleague with a fist bump. “I’m not touching that guy with the gloves,” says Alex. “He just did the Obama punch. I’m not doing that. I’m not touching that guy’s gloves after hearing about rat lungworm. I’m going to do the faraway wave.”
    The houses in the neighborhood have already been zapped with a powerful molluskicide that dehydrates the snails and boasts a kill rate of at least 85 percent. The job today is to go house to house to gather up the dead and dying gastropods.
    Omar Garcia is the man overseeing the cleanup. In the past week they’ve found a couple hundred giant African land snails in the area, he says. “We’ve just turned up, so you’ve got snails hibernating that are coming up as we agitate the ground and stuff like that. A lot at all stages: neonates, baby size to adult size.” A couple hundred is an improvement. “I remember we found over seven hundred snails on one property when I first started doing this in November 2011,” he says.
    â€œThere’s one here, Tristan,” calls Alex, who has been rooting through the front yard of the house. “Not that it’s going to run away.”
    Omar offers me a glove so I can join the snail hunt: “One glove enough?”
    I think for a second and then my brain screams,
“Rat lungworm.”
“Er … I’ll go for two, actually.”
    We search through the leaf litter, pulling back bushes, finding snail after snail. We pry them off leaves, haul them out of thesoil, and pick them from walls, dropping them into clear resealable plastic bags as we go. They may be the stuff of nightmares, but here—dead and dying in their rock-hard vertical brown-striped shells—it’s hard to think of them as the terrors they are.
    Miami has been here before, says Mark. “The original infestation was back in 1966 in North Miami where I grew up. A little boy brought back three snails from Hawaii, where they are pretty much endemic. He put them in his pockets, got home, put them in a terrarium and, lo and behold, a month later there’s hundreds of eggs. So grandma said let’s get rid of these eggs and tossed them out the back, not realizing what could happen.”
    Two years later the North Miami authorities discovered the snails and called in the Florida Department of Agriculture to eradicate them. It took four years and produced a haul of around eighteen thousand snails. This outbreak is far more serious. “It’s much more widespread,” says Mark. “We’ve done 137,000 in just over two years whereas they collected 18,000 in four years in the late ’60s and early ’70s.”
    The current outbreak came to light on September 8, 2011. One of the department’s fruit fly trappers was changing a trap on a house shared by two Cuban sisters on Thirty-Third Avenue in the Coral Way neighborhood. They asked if he could also help with their snail problem. “They had snails on the walls, snails in plants, snails in trees. The snails were