National Post (National Edition)
SWIMMER AT BANFF HOT SPRINGS DESTROYS PART OF RARE SNAIL HABITAT.
Bather invades only home of rare gastropod
EDMON TON • A small snail, at most the size of your little fingernail, lives in the pools at the Banff Hot Springs on Sulphur Mountain — but last Sunday, a swimmer splashed into a pool, partially destroying the habitat of this endangered gastropod.
The snail doesn’t live in the pools where tourists go to luxuriate after a day of skiing or shopping. Rather, it lives in the natural thermal pools, where its population has fluctuated over the years, vulnerable to human impact but also shifting in numbers as water temperatures rise and fall over the course of a year.
The only place in the entire world where this snail is found is in the Sulphur Mountain hot springs. Discovered in 1926 and first studied 70 years later, the Banff Springs snail was designated endangered in 2000 and then reassessed twice, in 2008 and 2018, when the status of endangered was confirmed.
“This small snail is the most at-risk wildlife species in Banff National Park,” the Parks Canada website says.
Dwayne Lepitzki, who studies the snails, has a PHD in parasitology and is the co-chair of the mollusks subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, said in 1926 they were found in nine pools.
By 1995, when he began studying them, they were found in five pools. “We’d already lost nearly half of the world’s numbers of populations when I started work- ing on it,” Lepitzki said.
Efforts in 2002 and 2003 to re-establish populations has brought the number back up to seven sub-populations, he told the Post.
These snails, which researchers find by crawling around on their hands and knees, are normally found on mats of bacteria and algae, which float on the water.
That’s because the snails have lungs — so they need to hang out close to the surface. In addition to their “probable food source,” says Parks Canada, it’s also where eggs are found. This means that people getting in and out of the pool is especially destructive, breaking up the mats that form the snail habitat.
While the adult snails won’t die if their mats sink — they can just crawl back up — the eggs will not receive enough oxygen in the thermal water, so the devel- oping snails will die.
“Where this person went swimming is critical habitat,” Lepitzki said.
Additionally, the snails can be crushed against the rocks as people brush up against the rocks on the way in and out — they have fairly soft shells, he said.
Back in 2015, an Ontario man received a $4,500 fine for swimming with the snails — while smoking a cigar — and claimed, according to the Calgary Herald, that God made him do it.
The Post asked Parks Canada for an interview; they did not respond by press time and declined to provide any information about the incident last Sunday. The Rocky Mountain Outlook newspaper reported the swimmer was a man, and that Parks Canada wardens are looking for him.