HAWAIIAN TREE SNAIL
Hawaiian land snail Achatinellta apexfulva was the first among their kind to be described in Western Science. Since then, more than 750 species of land snails from the Hawaiian Islands were discovered, according to a 2019 article by Russell Mclendon for Mother Nature Network. A. apexfulva was driven to extinction by invasive predators including rats, Jackson’s chameleons, and rose wolfsnails, a species originally from Central America that caused the extinction of eight other Hawaiian nail species, as reported by Mclendon, and also by Jonathan Kantor in a 2019 piece for Whatculture.com.
In 1997, 10 of these snails were brought to a laboratory in an attempt to breed and reintroduce them to the wild. Although several offspring were produced in the laboratory, none of them survived, except for George. Unfortunately, George, the last of his kind, died on New Year’s Day of 2019.