Could intrusive snails conserve coffee from a devastating insect?
While carrying out fieldwork in Puerto Rico's main hilly area in 2016, ecologists noticed tiny trails of bright orange snail poop on the undersurface of coffee fallen leaves afflicted with coffee fallen leave corrosion, the crop's most financially important insect.
Fascinated, they conducted area monitorings and lab experiments over the next several years and revealed that the extensive intrusive snail Bradybaena similaris, commonly known as the Oriental tramp snail and normally a plant-eater, had moved its diet to take in the fungal pathogen that causes coffee fallen leave corrosion, which has ravaged coffee ranches throughout Latin America recently.
Currently the College of Michigan scientists are exploring the opportunity that B. similaris and various other snails and slugs, which belong to a large course of pets called gastropods, could be used as an organic control to assist rein in coffee fallen leave corrosion. But as ecologists, they are keenly familiar with the many devastating attempts at organic control of insects in the previous.
"This is the very first time that any gastropod has been explained as consuming this pathogen, and this finding may possibly have ramifications for managing it in Puerto Rico," says doctoral trainee Zachary Hajian-Forooshani, lead writer of a paper in the journal Ecology.
"But further work is had to understand the potential tradeoffs B. similaris and various other gastropods may provide to coffee agroecosystems, provided our understanding of various other aspects within the system," says Hajian-Forooshani, whose consultant is ecologist John Vandermeer, a teacher in the division of ecology and transformative biology.
COFFEE RUST IN PUERTO RICO
Vandermeer and ecologist Ivette Perfecto, a teacher at the Institution for Environment and Sustainability, lead a group that has been monitoring coffee fallen leave corrosion and its community of all-natural opponents on 25 ranches throughout Puerto Rico's coffee-producing area.
Those all-natural opponents consist of fly larvae, mites, and a remarkably varied community of fungis surviving on coffee fallen leaves, within or together with the orange spots that note coffee fallen leave corrosion sores. Hajian-Forooshani has been examining all these all-natural opponents for his doctoral argumentation.
"Of all the all-natural opponents I have been examining, these gastropods in Puerto Rico most certainly and effectively clear the fallen leaves of the coffee fallen leave corrosion fungal spores," he says.
Chief amongst those gastropods is B. similaris, initially from Southeast Australia or europe and currently among the world's most commonly dispersed intrusive land snails. It has a brown covering that's 12 to 16 millimeters (approximately one-half to two-thirds of an inch) throughout.
