For the name "Fushou Snail", everyone is certainly not unfamiliar. Don't look at its name with an auspicious and peaceful atmosphere, but it is a thing that can make people "headache and brain fever". Recently, this period is the breeding season of Fushou snail, and piles of pink eggs can be seen from time to time on the plants along the river side of the Shanbei River, QinshanXia River, and on the stone wall of the embankment, which is most likely to be a Fushou snail.
Fushou snail, belonging to the bottle snail family, also known as large bottle snail, apple snail, is a large freshwater edible snail native to the Amazon River Basin in South America. Introduced to China in the 1980s, it was listed in 2003 as one of the first 16 "most harmful alien species" to invade China. The most suitable water temperature for the growth of Fushou snail is 25 °C to 32 °C, and the peak breeding period is from May to August. The warmer the day, the more eggs the Fushou snail lays, each female snail can lay about 10,000 eggs a year, and the eggs it lays, dozens or even thousands of neatly arranged into an oval shape, like a pink flower.
Every year, river maintenance personnel will immediately clean up the Fushou snail or its snail eggs when they find it. Since the beginning of this year, the District Water Facilities River Center has begun to conduct a thorough survey of the urban river channel, asking nearby residents to collect information and grasping the hazard situation of Fushou snails in key areas. From mid-April, a centralized clearance operation was carried out on Fushou snails, and professionals were organized to treat the eggs of Fushou snails in 70 rivers in Xujiahe, Dapuhexi, Shangchenghe and other urban areas.
Generally speaking, the eggs of the Fushou snail are removed from the shore and thrown into the river to prevent it from hatching. Because the eggs of Fushou snail need a dry environment, once they enter the water, not only can not hatch, but also may become fish, shrimp and other aquatic animals for food. In addition, the maintenance personnel will also install a lure device on the bank of the river to lure the Fushou snails, and then use tools such as shovels, fire tongs, and small nets to remove the snails and snail eggs seen along the way, and uniformly put the captured snails into bags and barrels, and concentrate on destroying the captured eggs.
The reason why people talk about "snail" discoloration is largely due to the fact that it is an intermediate host of the well-known parasitic disease. According to statistics, there are 3,000 fushou snails containing fewer parasites and more than 6,000. If you eat raw or not fully heated Fushou snail, it is very easy to cause foodborne Guangzhou tube strongyloidiasis, after infection, nematode larvae will invade the human brain, damage the central nervous system, cause eosinophilia meningitis, can cause headache, fever, neck stiffness and other symptoms, severe cases can cause dementia, and even death.
Fushou snail adult body
So, how to distinguish between the field snails we eat every day and the Fushou snails? In fact, the two of them have subtle differences in size, shape, and color: from the size point of view, the adult Fushou snail is generally much larger than the field snail, looks full and round, quite "lucky"; in terms of color, the shell color of the Fushou snail is lighter than the field snail, yellow-brown, and the field snail is blue-brown; the biggest difference between the shape of the two is in the tail and the lid, the tail of the field snail is vertebral,the cover is round, and the tail of the Fushou snail is very short, the cover is flattened, and the overall disc shape is disc-shaped. If it is a snail without a shell, you can focus on the color, similar to the color of the shell, the overall snail meat is white, there are also cyan and blue-gray, and the Fushou snail is yellowish brown.
Text/Xiang Yaqiong Correspondent Yang Jiasi
Editor/Yu Haibo