When Monster Snails Eat Wetlands

Last June, my colleagues and I at the Green Water Nature Center were worried that there were both too many and too few apple snails in our ponds.

Established ten years ago, the Center is an environmental NGO dedicated to safeguarding a drinking water reservoir in Green Water Village, a small village in the lower-Yangtze region of China. The four small ponds we were working in are the Center’s newest initiative: a micro-wetland. The Center built these ponds in the middle of local rice paddies last winter to treat water pollution from the fertilizers used in rice cultivation.

Artificial wetlands are well-established purification systems. These human-made ponds were proposed as a “nature-based solution,” an approach that emphasizes the use of natural processes to address environmental challenges such as climate change and water insecurity.^[1]

The unexpected arrival of apple snails, however, undermined the seemingly tested and proven solution. This reckless, invasive alien is reminiscent of what Tsing et al. call “monsters of the Anthropocene,”creatures that proliferate precisely due to blindly-woven multispecies entanglements, bringing unintended and often undesirable consequences on both humans and nonhumans.

Apple snails compromised the micro-wetland project’s ambition to “make water clean again”  and outwitted follow-up schemes to discipline them. Disrupting these plans, apple snails expose the hubris that allow humans to imagine conquering nature—or saving it.

In the face of prevalent corporate sponsorship in the conservation industry, we need to be more alert to swarms of false solutions, so that we might still imagine and enact alternative ways to engage with nonhuman others.

Unwelcome Guests

The micro-wetland project is founded on the assumption that aquatic plants would purify the water by absorbing excessive nutrients from chemical fertilizers.

It was May when my colleagues and I realized the ponds were empty, and the few plants still alive were in bad shape. As expected, our water quality tests also suggested no consistent reduction of pollutants. When an expert in aquatic botany came by, they postulated that the main culprit was apple snails—a roughly chicken-egg sized, yellowish-brown freshwater snail.

Indeed, on sunny days, one could easily observe apple snails eating plants in the ponds, especially those soft, submerged aquatic plants known to best purify polluted water. One could also easily observe their clusters of tens to hundreds of pinkish eggs on tall stalks of wild rice and irises.

Native to South America, apple snails (Pomacea canaliculata) were introduced to China as a food source in the 1980s. Their rather auspicious Chinese name, fushouluo (福寿螺), translates to the “luck and longevity” snail. Although later disfavored as a dish, apple snails have spread widely in tropical and sub-tropical parts of China, roaming freely in rivers, lakes, and irrigation systems. They were first spotted in Green Water Village around three years ago.

The micro-wetland draws water from upstream rice paddies as well as the nearby Green Water Creek, and apple snails arrive with the flow. They must have found our ponds a great habitat: There is water all year round, the flow is slow, and there is ample food. With no predator in the region (with the exception of crocodiles, we were told), they quickly became the dominant organism in our ponds.

Nature-based solutions employ nature as a tool, like its components can be disassembled and reassembled as needed for human ends. In our case, the wetland ecosystem is summoned as a “magic bullet” cure for intensive farming. It appears, however, that “nature” is far more complicated, variable and disobedient.

Taming the Untamed

The micro-wetland was designed to be a model project from the beginning, a venue where outsiders could learn about ecological restoration. Every element of the project was supposed to be well-ordered, displayable, and ready for public participation. Interpretative panels, for example, were put up near the ponds to inform visitors why the micro-wetland is needed, what plants are out there, etc.

Anticipating a thriving wetland over the summer, we scheduled an educational tour with more than 80 student volunteers from Shanghai months in advance. The profusion of apple snails and the dearth of plants, however, precluded the plan.

We proposed instead to have students manually remove apple snails, to defend the micro-wetland from this invasive species. This should have worked since we had so many snails that even 80 students might not be able to collect them all. However, we forgot that June is the “plum rain” season. Heavy rainfall meant that not only was it hard to work outdoors, but also apple snails became almost invisible. The ponds were extremely murky, the water was waist-level, and apple snails retreated to the pond bottom or into the mud. Ironically, our trouble became that we now had “too few” apple snails for students to pick up.

We came up with a Plan B: having students transplant additional seedlings into the ponds. When the scheduled day finally came, students arrived, did the assigned work, and left happy.

However, struggles with apple snails were far from over. In fact, it was getting worse. The newly planted seedlings ended up replenishing their dwindling food supply.

The whole event was like an orchestrated performance where apple snails refused to follow the script. They never behaved as we wished. At first, there were too many of them. Yet when we decided to teach students that we can still restore wetland ecology by identifying and eliminating invasive species, they suddenly disappeared—only to take the stage again when the audience dispersed.

The apple snail reminds me of other rogue actors. Timothy Mitchell writes about how an invasive species of mosquito took advantage of Egypt’s sugar cane, Aswan Dam, and the wartime conditions of the 1940s to provoke a deadly malaria epidemic. In analyzing the agency of the mosquito, he famously asks, “Can the mosquito speak?” Similarly, Ashley Carse studies how the Panama Canal is constantly disrupted by sediments, weeds, and fluctuating water levels. Infrastructures almost always encounter feral appropriations by nonhuman actors with their own agenda.

While the Aswan Dam and the Panama Canal represent grand engineering feats seeking to transform and harness nature, the micro-wetland project seems a modest endeavor to, at least nominally, rehabilitate it. Yet the uncooperative apple snails, if anything, belie a deep, shared ignorance—and denial—of nonhuman temporalities and agency.

Can apple snails speak, then?

Water Benefits

Students and snails aren’t the only ones who are attracted to the micro-wetlands. They also attract corporations. Coca-Cola, specifically, paid for the micro-wetland’s construction because it could be translated into “water benefits.”

Investing in water benefits is like purchasing carbon offsets: Companies “compensate” for their water usage or pollution in this way. Coca-Cola sponsors a variety of water-related projects worldwide as part of their sustainability initiatives. The water benefits from each are quantified using a method called “Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting.”

As our micro-wetland aims at improving water quality, we need to prove that it treated a certain amount of water, and that water quality has been improved after treatment. The project’s water benefits then derives from the multiplication of the two values. The quantitative formula, the quasi-experimental method (comparing the water quality before and after treatment), and the numeric values obtained from scientific instruments and lab tests all give water benefits an objective—hence indisputable—appearance.

Apple snails and many other unexpected actors, however, made the goal difficult to attain. While the apple snails feasted, nearby villagers, farmers, and other undesirable aquatic organisms such as water silk and duckweeds also did not necessarily work in our favor.

Challenges occurred almost on a daily basis as we tried to make the micro-wetland fulfill the promised water benefits: stopping villagers from using or affecting the micro-wetland, manually removing apple snails, water silk and duckweeds, testing if different aquatic plants could survive apple snails. We even applied pesticides and herbicides a few times to kill apple snails, water silk, and duckweeds when their amplification went beyond control (even though doing so might have killed other organisms too).

In the end, we did reach the promised water benefits. The number then contributed a fraction of Coca-Cola’s advertised ecological restoration efforts, i.e. returning trillions of liters of clean water to nature. Could a project like this though actually offset the harms done by corporate giants?

Beneath the black box of “water benefits,” unruly apple snails challenge the reductionist and managerial view of nature prevalent in corporate-funded conservation. Such interventions expect nature to provide ecosystem services, “green infrastructure” to supply offsets, parks to showcase green development and host ecotourist activities, etc.

The micro-wetland, however, actually unfolds as a much more lively and interdependent assemblage in which diverse world-making projects intertwine. Quantification, in this light, constructs narratives of success by erasing the radical alterity of other human and nonhuman actors.

The Monstrosity that is Human

Labeled invasive and alien, apple snails fit the monster lexicon. Accordingly, we tried strenuously to banish them from the micro-wetland. Their monstrosity, though, is less about them and more about us. They “invade” ecologies through the ways that humans have reordered life and landscapes in our busy, global traffic of goods.

Green Water Village has been witnessing several ever-intensifying landscape transformations: inflows of migrant farmers since the 1860s, large-scale agricultural reclamation since the 1950s, use of agrochemicals since the 1980s, and monocultural farming of rice or other economic crops in recent decades.

The micro-wetland is but the newest episode. The construction of artificial wetlands meant heavily modifying lands and waters with a mighty excavator, followed by the introduction of aquatic plants purchased from commercial nurseries, where most varieties are non-native. Prioritizing the production of water benefits, we tried to multiply aquatic plants while extinguishing apple snails and other factors that might make the project unsuccessful.

Although the micro-wetland looks a far cry from plantations, the plantationocene logic of ecological simplification and multispecies labor is astonishingly present. Lacking real care for the interconnected and dynamic web of life on the land, such conservation projects continue to be blind to—and in effect vulnerable to—the monsters that they themselves create.

During the summer months, we hired a villager living nearby to collect apple snails from the ponds and crush them daily. A colleague confessed to me that she felt uneasy when she passed by and smelled these aquatic organisms’ dead bodies. The smell reminded her that they were once living creatures.

Apple snails are indeed living, and agential. They defy imaginations of nature as a functional machine, where pollution goes in and clean water comes out. They necessitate that we put multispecies care, rather than corporate and scientific hubris, at the core of conservation.

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Featured Image: Apple snails are large freshwater snails introduced to China in the 1980s. Photo by Stijn Ghesquiere, 2004.

Qieyi Liu holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto (2024), where she completed her dissertation entitled “Enlivening Ten Thousand Things: Scientific Knowledge of the Living World in Modern China, 1900-1960.” Qieyi is currently a farm apprentice as she continues to explore multispecies entanglements. She is also the human of a Chinese garden dog named “Jumpy” and enjoys making sourdough breads. Contact.

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^[1] The concept was proposed by international organizations like the International Union for Conservation of Nature and World Bank in the late 2000s and widely advocated by the Nature Conservancy (TNC), a USA-based conservation NGO which operates internationally. The Green Water Nature Center has unofficial ties with TNC.