Boom in UK Snail Population Could Spread Deadly Parasite to Dogs [VIDEO]

By tagging garden snails and recording their overnight movement with time-lapse photography, researchers have learned that the mollusks move in convoys and can explore the average length of a British garden overnight, able to cover as much of one meter of distance in an hour. The find could be worrisome for dog owners, who's pets are at risk of contracting a parasite from the snails.

The movements of 450 garden snails were tracked by tagging them multicolored LED lights and UV paint and recording their movement. Dave Hodgson, an associate professor of ecology at University of Exeter, says his study is the first time sails have been studied in this way.

"The findings reveal how snails will travel distances of up to 25 meters in a 24-hour period, and seek out areas of shelter, such as long grass, trees or objects, including dogs' toys, left in the garden overnight," Hodgson said. "We also discovered that snails move in convoys, piggy-backing on the slime of other snails to conserve energy. It is thought that a snail could use up to 30 per cent of its energy in slime production alone."

Hodgson said he and his colleagues were surprised by the snails piggybacking on each others' slime.

"Given a chance, a snail will prefer to follow a trail that has been laid by another, it is a form of cheating like slipstreaming," he said to the BBC.

The BBC reported that wet summers in Britain over the past few years have been a boon to snail populations and that their numbers increased by 50 percent last year. The surge in snails is worrisome to dog owners, whose pets can become infected with the parasite Angiostrongylus vasorum, also known as French lungworm.

"They are not just lettuce munchers, they are carriers of parasites that can kill your dogs," Hodgson told the BBC. "It is a national problem and we all have to pay attention to the interactions between dogs and snails," he said.

The lungworm, which is now considered endemic throughout much of the UK, can be contracted by dogs that ingest even the smallest snails they come upon in the grass. A recent survey of 150 veterinarians' offices in the UK reported nearly 1,000 cases of the the lungworm in dogs, with 81 deaths thought to have been caused by the parasite. As snail populations increase, the range of the parasite is also spreading from its traditional habitat in the south to more northerly regions such as Scotland.

Hodgson's study was commissioned by the Be Lungworm Aware campaign, which was set up and funded by Bayer Animal Health.