PEOPLE 



& PLACES 



Saving Snails. . . 



and other 

 steps toward 

 a healthy 

 planet 



By Odile Fredericks 



^spite the clutter in his office 

 at the N.C. Aquarium at Fort Fisher, Andy 

 Wood seems to know where everything is. 

 Reconstructed fossil bones compete for 

 attention with pieces of driftwood from the 

 beach outside, frog-crossing signs, stacks 

 of books and tanks of water where he's 

 creating habitats. A telescope lets him 

 keep a watchful eye on the ocean. From 

 his window, he monitors the loading of 

 alligators that he'll take to Florida tomor- 

 row. 



Order exists amid the chaos, as in the 

 natural world. Education curator for the 

 aquarium, Wood is a lifelong environmen- 

 talist who works quietly to rectify the 

 damage he sees destroying the planet. His 

 penchant for stewarding the smallest of 

 creatures reveals his philosophy that 

 everything is interconnected. 



"Unlike most people's perceptions, 

 the dominoes begin to fall with the little 

 teensy things that you don't see," says 

 Wood, who carries a beeper at all times so 

 he can be available to callers with 

 environmental concerns. 



Andy Wood admires the magnificent rams-horn snail, 

 a species that may be confined to his backyard. 



For Wood, activism is a way of life 

 that begins in his back yard. Six years ago, 

 when a friend in the U.S. Army Corps of 

 Engineers asked him to take in some 

 vulnerable snails, he agreed. Today, his 

 yard may be the breeding ground for the 

 last of the magnificent rams-horn snails. 

 No more than an inch and a half long, the 

 snails are on the state's endangered species 

 list and could be federally listed if Wood's 

 research pans out. A freshwater creature, 

 the snail is sensitive to changes in salinity. 



"It's now possible that it is no longer 

 in the wild, which means the entire species 

 is in my back yard in captive propagation," 

 he says. 



Once thought extinct, the magnificent 

 rams-horn has been found in the wild in 

 only two locations, both in southeastern 

 North Carolina, says Bill Adams, a 



biologist with the Corps of Engineers in 

 Wilmington, who rediscovered the snails 

 about 20 years ago. And it is possible that 

 the snails may now have disappeared from 

 these locations since no one has been able 

 to verify their existence there lately. 



The principal investigator for a U.S. 

 Fish and Wildlife Service propagation 

 study of the snails, Wood has spent the past 

 few years trying to find out what they need 

 to survive. Their demise, he believes, is 

 linked to the disappearance of their 

 habitats, which concerns him. By the mid- 

 19th century, the beaver ponds where they 

 used to live practically vanished as beaver 

 populations dwindled due to trapping. 

 Now development encroaches on the 

 freshwater ponds where the snails were 

 also found, and runoff from construction 

 changes the surrounding landscape. 



30 SPRING 1999 



