Wood Scientists Lock Horns with Alien Snails:
Best Served Steamed, Say Virginia Tech Researchers
They’re out there. At port areas such as Houston, Texas as well as other locations along the East Coast, the U.S. is being invaded by alien snails. Full disclosure, the aliens aren’t from outer space. Rather, they are hitchhikers from the Mediterannean that wiggle their way between boxes of tiles in unit loads arriving from Europe.
Now thanks to technology developed for ISPM15 heat treatment, a 45-minute session in a portable chamber where vacuum and then steam is applied to pallets full of infested goods offers a promising solution.
Researchers in Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment demonstrated their treatment technology can kill snails, using a load of Italian tile inoculated with the invasive Mediterranean snail Cernuella cisalpine.
The snails crawl onto pallets stored at weedy locations adjacent to Mediterranean tile facilities, said Ron Mack, a commodity treatment specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, who was present for the demonstration.
Once the pallets are loaded with 1,500 pounds of packaged tile or marble, the snails crawl under the wrapping material. After shipment to the U.S., the snails escape from pallets that have been unloaded at ports and at various other locations in the distribution chain.
“They eat all kinds of stuff,” said Zhangjing Chen, a research scientist at the Brooks Forest Products Center in the college’s Department of Sustainable Biomaterials and one of the inventors of the vacuum-steam treatment.
8 Pallets West
At an undisclosed location at Virginia Tech, research scientist Zhangjing Chen examines the problematic snails.