The Rarest Snail in the World Do development and scientific
study conflict with conservation? Into the Thicket We set out
one morning, equipped with plastic bags, brushes, a sieve,
sunscreen, a camera and a flask of water, to look for snails. We
hiked to a habitat we thought sounded right: an area off one of
the main roads where there had once been a historic house
belonging to Captain Woody. The captain was a remarkable man who
had cleared, by hand, the original airstrip on Little Cayman in
the 1960s. The area where his house had stood was fairly open,
with lots of exposed limestone bedrock and thickets of small
trees and shrubs with sparse undergrowth. After roughly 15
minutes of scouring the ground and picking up snails that were
not C. nanus, my husband cried “Got it!” He’d found an empty C.
nanus shell among many more C. pannosum shells. Whereas the C.
pannosum shell is about the size of a large plump peanut and is
white—sometimes with brown highlights on its rough surface—the
C. nanus shells are only ha