Recently, CCTV broadcast a news: Snails have appeared in many places in Guangdong Province, such as Huizhou and Shenzhen, and there are signs of flooding. Experts in the program warned citizens not to touch them, let alone touch them. Edible, what's going on?

01. 5.4 million acres of farmland were damaged

As May is approaching, the temperature in the south is rising, and the creatures in the farmland have become active. Things like apple snails have also appeared in fish. Ponds, lakes, ditches and other places.

On some stones, you can also see the eggs produced by apple snails densely packed. The eggs are brightly colored, and the children want to touch them with their hands after seeing them.

However, no one knows that apple snails are causing great harm to agriculture. They are competing with humans for food rations. Once they spread, it will lead to a reduction in vegetable and rice production.

Recently, reporters from Banyuetan came to the Shaoshan Irrigation District in Hunan for interviews. Along the way, they found a large number of traces of the breeding of apple snails. They saw large swaths of eggs near reservoirs and ponds, and even a certain water training base. To "dye red".

However, many local people do not know that apple snails are harmful substances. In this regard, experts Dai Qingming and Xie Nianbao popularized the harm of apple snails to agricultural production:

1. Affect the growth of vegetables

Apple snails are very easy to grow. They grow fastest in an environment of 25-32 degrees Celsius and like to eat plant leaves. Therefore, they are very harmful to aquatic crops grown in the south, such as lotus root and wild rice.

Once apple snails appear in water bodies, these aquatic crops will face a reduction in production, and severe damage will reduce production by about 50%.

2. Reduced grain production

The south mainly grows rice, and rice is also the staple food of our country.

In the early stages of rice growth, apple snails tend to eat seedlings, resulting in fewer seedlings and weak rice growth, which in turn reduces rice yield.

According to relevant data from the Hunan Department of Agriculture, in some areas affected by the apple snail, the rice field shortage rate reaches 20%, and the rice yield is greatly affected. The yield per mu is reduced by 5-10%, and the damage is more serious. It is to reduce production by 30-50%, which not only intensifies the economic losses of farmers, but also endangers our country's food security.

3. Deterioration of the environment

For many years, in order to disinfect apple snails, various places have also used drugs to kill them. However, they are relatively resistant to drugs and reproduce too fast. One female snail can It can lay 300,000 eggs per year, and it only takes 15 days to hatch into young snails. It takes 2 months to reach sexual maturity and start breeding again.

Therefore, once apple snails breed on a large scale, it will seriously damage the water ecological environment, compete with other organisms for sunlight and water, and damage the local ecological chain.

If allowed to reproduce, it will also intensify eutrophication of water bodies and worsen water quality.

It is reported that 95 counties and cities in Hunan will be affected by apple snail erosion in 2021, with the occurrence area reaching 5.4 million acres.

For example, in Hanshou County, a high-incidence area, the density of apple snail larvae in rice fields has reached 100,000/mu. Lao Liu, a large grain grower, said: "Last year, we contracted more than 200 acres of land, of which 170 acres were infested with apple snails." Disaster, there are 20 apple snails per square meter, and the seedlings will be eaten up in a few days, causing heavy losses.

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Now the apple snails have entered the peak spawning period. If they are not destroyed at this time. If killed, more farmland will be harmed.

02. Why can’t you touch or eat it?

Nowadays, apple snails have become widespread in Hunan, Guangdong and other places, and many experts have issued warnings not to touch them, let alone eat them.

After many people see the apple snail, they think it is a field snail at first sight, and then think it is edible.

After all, crayfish, an exotic species, can only be raised to meet domestic demand due to the contributions of foodies.

The meat of field snails is delicious, but can the larger snails also be made into delicacies?

In fact, the reason why apple snails spread in our country was originally introduced for "eating".

As early as 1979, overseas Chinese in Argentina introduced apple snails to Taiwan, but they were discarded because the meat quality was not very good.

Two years later, the Chinese in Brazil saw that there were no apple snails in mainland China. They believed that apple snails were nutritious and easy to breed, so there must be a market in my country, so they introduced them to Zhongshan City for trial breeding.

Due to the suitable climate and abundant water bodies, apple snails were quickly cultured successfully and were later promoted to the entire province of Guangdong.

Following this, Guangxi, Fujian, Sichuan, Hunan, Yunnan and other places also introduced breeding.

Because apple snails are easy to breed, many people follow the trend of farming. In addition, the market price of apple snails is low and the meat is rich, which also attracts many foodies. With a two-pronged approach, apple snails have been cultivated in more than 10 provinces in the south, but in just ten years Many years later, an "ecological defense war" began.

People have found that areas where apple snails are densely harmed agriculture are extremely harmful, especially adverse effects on rice.

For example, in the first seven years of cultivation, 130,000 hectares of rice fields in 37 counties in Guangdong were attacked by white snails.

In 2003, the apple snail was listed as one of the first batch of seriously harmful invasive alien species, and then the "Human Snail War" began that lasted for more than ten years and continues to this day.

In addition to its impact on the environment, it also has great harm to human health.

For example, the 2006 Beijing cold snail meat incident caused an uproar. Diners soon developed symptoms such as headaches, itching, and facial paralysis after eating it, and more than 160 people were affected.

In 2017, a woman couldn’t help but eat apple snails, but she suffered a lot for the next six months. A physical examination found that the parasite had entered her brain, and she took too many hormone drugs during treatment. Huge damage was done to his body.

So, why do apple snails cause harm to the human body? Research has found that there are more than 6,000 parasites in a single apple snail, including Angiostrongylus cantonensis, Echinostomia and others.

Most of these parasites are resistant to high temperatures and are difficult to kill with normal cooking. Once ingested by humans, they will become ill.

Therefore, experts suggest that you must not eat it or touch it casually, otherwise there is a risk of parasitic infection.

In order to control apple snails, various places have launched eradication wars. Now they mainly focus on agricultural control, chemical control, and biological control. Among them, chemical control has the best effect, but spraying pesticides will also cause damage to farmland and ecology. cause impact.

Biological control means feeding ducks in farmland so that the ducks can eliminate the snails. However, the practical feasibility of this operation is not great, and we must also be wary of the risk of ducks infecting humans with parasites after eating the snails.

Killing apple snails is a long-term and sustainable process. It is not easy to kill them completely. However, as long as we control them from the source, strengthen quarantine, strengthen prevention and control methods, and increase technological research, I believe we will find a suitable way to kill them. Killing method.