A snail of a time

00:00 Eliza Herbert: Listeners are advised that the following episode may contain names and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that have passed away.

00:07 Kid 1: The noise they make is silent. Like that's what they make.
00:12 Kid 2: A slimy fat worm with a shell.

00:18 Eliza Herbert: What do you think of when it comes to snails? Maybe the squelch under foot when you’ve accidentally trod on one. Or maybe picture them in your garden, or letterbox munching on important letters. But did you know most of the common snails that you see around cities or towns are actually introduced species and they don't reflect the extraordinary types of snails that are native to this continent? 

Up until recently, the most I knew about snails was what I've learned as a kid playing in the backyard. Scientist Frank Koehler and Norm McKenzie, on the other hand, are what some would call gastropod experts.

00:57 Frank Koehler: So, these Kimberley islands and also some of the coastal areas of the mainland, are actually extraordinary in that, in very small spaces, you may find hundreds, if not thousands of these snails, specifically on these islands.

01:14 Norm McKenzie: It's the Camaenas. It's the bigger land snails we're talking about here. And so, you get big globular ones and small globular ones. You get flat ones, not globular. Big and small. You get minute ones, and each of those is effectively a different genus. We're talking about different groups of species. That is, in evolutionary terms, they're more different.

01:39 Frank Koehler: So, while you may have hundreds or thousands of specimens in an area, maybe of a 1000 square meters, that's the only place in the world where you will ever find them. So, they are rare in that they only occur in in very, very restricted places.

01:58 Norm McKenzie: The islands on that coast are a microcosm of the adjacent mainland, so the rugged sandstone country, the massive volcanic scree slopes, the dolerites, the beaches, the mangrove forests, all of those mosaics in landscape are represented to a greater or lesser extent on the islands.

02:18 Eliza Herbert: Frank and Norm are talking about Wunambal Gaambera country in the northern Kimberley, where some select rainforest patches and a group of islands has become a haven for land snails. And it's got the science world extremely excited. But this is more than a story about snails. It's also a story of protection and how Traditional Owners are keeping their country healthy.

This is Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia. My name is Eliza Herbert, and today we're going to hear about how Uunguu Rangers are managing and protecting Wunambal Gaambera country. And the happy outcome, a bounty of slimy slithering friends. 

This story with the snails begins back in the late 80s, in David Bowie's era, when a group of Traditional Owners and scientists set out to survey biodiversity in the Kimberley, including patches of rainforests known as wulo on Wunambal Gaambera country. 

What they found was a group of gastropods, highly endemic land snails from the Camaenidae family, that have stood the test of time. They collected over 29,000 snail specimens representing 115 species, a hundred of which had never been found before.

Two decades later, in Beyonce’s era, another group of Traditional Owners and scientists set out again. This time, they voyaged to 22 of the islands off the coast in a series of six surveying expeditions. Uunguu Rangers, Jeremy Kowan and Desmond Williams were among the group who visited the islands between 2006 and 2010.

04:06 Jeremy Kowan: A few years ago, before we started our Ranger program, we went out on a snail trip to Parry Harbour and then Wago Cliffs. We got a few live snails and yeah, a few dead ones. We sampled them in different areas.

04:25 Desmond Williams: The island could look dry and all that. But amongst the shade and all that, it's all moist, you know, moist. It's all like cool area where the snails hang up underneath those leaves or underneath those rocks, you know. And when we move those rocks with our hands, we can see them snails.

04:45 Eliza Herbert: Uunguu Rangers are employed by the Wunambal Gaambera Aboriginal Corporation to care for their country, as guided by the Healthy Country Plan, which we will touch on more later. Wunambal Gaambera country makes up 2.5 million hectares of land and salt water in the North Kimberley region of Australia. It is a beautiful and remote biodiversity hotspot of white sandy beaches, rocky escarpments and rugged gorges.

05:12 Tom Vigilante: Yeah, I guess the idea is that the larger islands hold more biodiversity, more animals and important plants. There's been some earlier work done on snails as part of the Kimberley Rainforest Survey. So, they'd already identified a whole lot of endemic snails on the mainland, in particular, in rainforest patches and on islands too. So, scientists already understood the diversity and the significance of snails but knew that there was a lot more to discover.

05:42 Eliza Herbert: Tom Vigilante is the Wunambal Gaambera Healthy Country manager and was present during these surveys with Jeremy and Desmond.

05:49 Tom Vigilante: It was quite challenging field work because you had to go and camp out with very minimal equipment for, you know, five days or so on an island and everything had to be carried on the helicopter. So, there was, you know, just a bare minimum of water and food and tents.

06:07 Desmond Williams: Moving around with a stick or something to move those leaves and then we can find snails.

06:14 Tom Vigilante: And a lot of these Uunguu people hadn't been to some of those islands before. So, they knew about them through their old people, but they hadn't been there themselves. So that was, you know, an opportunity for them to see the country. But it was also probably quite daunting for them as well. You know, there are a lot of islands out there.

06:33 Desmond Williams: My country means so much to me. Like when we are working out on country, you know it's good being out in bush and learning more cultural stuff and all that.

06:42 Eliza Herbert: During their expeditions, Traditional Owners and scientists identified at least 50 more snail species. This is what got scientists referring to this part of the world as the “Galapagos of the Kimberley”.

06:57 Desmond Williams: Yeah. All the different snails. They get so excited about it.

06:59 Tom Vigilante: Yeah. Well, most people don't think about snails. When they think of the Kimberley and the biological values of the Kimberley, they think of all the iconic animals and plants. It's turned out that the Kimberley is the centre of diversity for this family of snails in Australia and some islands have their own species or multiple species endemic to them. 

The Galapagos Islands are well known around the world as where Charles Darwin came up with some of his ideas around speciation and something similar has happened in the Kimberley with these islands. And also, the rainforests which are basically islands of vegetation surrounded by savannah and that's where these snails have been able to speciate to such diversity.

07:47 Eliza Herbert: The creation of a new plant or animal species is thanks to speciation. There are multiple types of speciation, but in essence it refers to the lengthy process in which a species develops a set of unique characteristics to define itself as a flash brand-new species. Land snails have often been identified based on their shell character, so the shape of the shell, the colour, the size and so on. These species were trickier to single out because they had never been seen before, and so scientists were faced with the conundrum of identifying and naming a large amount of different looking shells.

08:25 Frank Koehler: So, actually it was a daunting task trying to understand how many species I was dealing with just by looking at them?  So, we are using scientific methods to try to get a more objective idea of how many species we are looking at. 

One way of doing this is for instance using DNA based analysis, which can give you insights into the relationships of the animals that you study. We also use statistical methods trying to understand where the variation within species ends and where the variation between species begins by using measurements of shells, for instance. And then a very important aspect also is the reproductive anatomy in land snails. So, we are dissecting the body of the snail, and we are looking at the reproductive organs.

09:21 Eliza Herbert: I bet that's not what you're expecting to hear, or that most land snails are hermaphrodites, meaning they're both male and female.

09:30 Frank Koehler: They have male and female organs and can function and act as males and females simultaneously, and what we found is that, in particular, the anatomy of their penises, or the male organs is highly specific for each species, and very informative and helpful to distinguish species from one another. 

The shell of a snail is filled with the complete body which contains muscle, the foot muscles to move, nervous system, reproductive and digestive organ. But the reproductive organs take up quite a large part of that and so it just shows that reproduction is, of course, one of the most important undertakings of living beings. They probably represent one third of the body mass of a snail is just reproductive organs.

10:31 Norm McKenzie: And the mechanism that they have evolved to protect their genetic adaptations, their morphological anatomical adaptations, the reproductive organs, don't fit your savanna counterpart. So, it's like a key in a lock. It's a very overt and rather interesting way of maintaining your adaptive integrity, so you're still efficient as an operator within the community of other land snails that you live amongst, and partition resources with. 

So, everyone has their little niche. You go a kilometer or so and you'll find yourself in a rainforest patch and the assemblage of Camaena land snails looks quite different. The globular ones are a little bit smaller. Their surfaces are accessible to at least one of them. You go to the next hill, the shape  is a little bit different, so there's specific adaptation as a species to fit within their community is a little bit different. It's a hands-on, very specific example of evolution in operation.

11:45 Frank Koehler: Going to the Kimberley Islands just blew my mind because there was just so much more. Like all these snails, for instance, and all these trees and plants. And lizards and snakes and insects that I was surrounded with, they were just of a completely different magnitude to my lived experience as a European. 

I think we often talk about biodiversity hotspots like the rainforest in the Amazon or in Eastern Australia, but to actually see it with your own eyes and experience it with your own senses, when standing in an actual biodiversity hotspot, is something very special.

12:35 Desmond Williams: Like if you find the snails in the islands, that's letting you know that, around the island area, it is still healthy around that area. You know, if you see snails and they're looking real healthy. And we don't know that around the island and it's all, yeah, looking real healthy, they're good.

12:55 Tom Vigilante: Around the same time that this Kimberley Island survey was beginning, Wunambal Gaambera people were getting their native title determined and at the same time, they were preparing to dedicate their land and their water as an Indigenous Protected Area, and they're establishing their range of programs.

13:15 Eliza Herbert: In 2011, the Wunambal Gaambera Aboriginal Corporation secured native title over their country. At the same time, they declared the first stage of the Uunguu Indigenous Protected Area, or IPA for short, covering 343,700 hectares, and they entered into a ten-year partnership with Bush Heritage Australia. In 2015, the second stage of the IPA, was declared, bringing the total area to 759,806 hectares. 

Now just a little sidebar, If you're unsure what the difference is between native title and IPAs, there's a bit to it, but here's the gist.  Australian law recognises that native title exists where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have maintained a connection to their land and waters since sovereignty, through their traditional laws and customs. But native title rights and interests may have been extinguished or impaired by acts done by government or other parties. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can apply to have their native title rights recognised under the Native Title Act 1993. 

An Indigenous Protected Area or IPA is an area of land and sea, managed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups as protected areas for biodiversity conservation. They are voluntary agreements with the Australian government and at the time of recording this episode, there are over 80 dedicated IPA's covering over 80 million hectares of land. IPAs in part recognize that Traditional Owner groups are protecting their cultural values and managing country for conservation, and they also provide some financial opportunity for Traditional Owners to work and look after their country.

14:59 Tom Vigilante: As part of that, they prepared this Healthy Country plan, which is a ten-year plan about how they wanted to look after their country. Bush Heritage was the partner that helped them develop the Healthy Country plan using the planning approach that they'd been using. And after the plan was developed and there was a kind of shared vision for where things were going, they committed to a ten-year partnership and that's ongoing. So, Bush Heritage has been a really valuable partner and one that's there to support Wunambal Gaambera people to look after country.

15:32 Eliza Herbert: The Wunambal Gaambera Healthy Country Plan was the first ever of its kind, which has since gone on to be adopted by other Aboriginal groups in the Kimberley and nationally to guide their work on country. Wunambal Gaambera people wanted to create a plan that told the right story, and that was strong for them. That fulfilled their cultural obligations and kept country and all things in it healthy, while also recognizing new ways of looking after their land using Western science and technology. 

A key feature of the plan was to identify targets, which are things that are considered priorities to look after. These include, but are not limited to, the rainforests where some of the snails live, right way fire, law and culture. And some of their important marine species.

16:22 Desmond Williams: We monitor dugongs and the corals and turtles. We do turtle surveys and dugong surveys, corals and all that. Yeah. Like we do cross-country walks all year round. We just tell by the animals. If the animals are looking more and real healthy, we'll know the country is real healthy too you know.

16:41 Eliza Herbert: To look after these targets. they also identified threats that Wunambal Gaambera people were concerned about, such as visitors not being respectful, climate change, loss of traditional knowledge and lack of land and sea management capacity. Their sea management includes the protection of the islands.

16:59 Tom Vigilante: Islands are important because they're protected from some of the things that are threats on the mainland, like some feral animals and weeds and things like wildfires. They're important refuges. But they still have to be looked after to make sure those things don't arrive. Cane toads and weeds for example. And we have a lot of tourism on the coast, so people like to visit all these places. But you know, there are risks that threats could be introduced if we're not careful. Or from overseas, from foreign fishing vessels and those sorts of things, or just coming in by natural means, you know, birds and bats and things that migrate. So yeah, it's very important to keep monitoring and looking after these places.

17:42 Eliza Herbert: One of the threats, weeds, are probably familiar to listeners, but can you imagine managing them across hundreds of thousands of hectares?

17:51 Desmond Williams: They're all different weeds you got, you got Stylo (Stylosanthes). You got Paddy’s Lucerne (Sida rhombifolia). You've got Grader grass (Themeda quadrivalis), you know, and the main thing is Grader grass and Rosella weed (Hibiscus sabdariffa).

18:06 Eliza Herbert: Weed management is one of their massive jobs. Another is right-way fire.

18:11 Desmond Williams: Oh yeah, a main worry. Yes, really. Fire, fire. Get worried that it might go to the next community or station and you know, we'll ring them up and let them know that, you know, be prepared. Make sure they get the equipment ready. Let them know that fire is heading towards them or sometimes we just drive over there or just give them a hand, you know to do a fire break and all that.

18:36 Eliza Herbert: Wunambal Gaambera people speak of right-way fire in their Healthy Country Plan. It is is one of the most important tools to look after and keep country healthy. It helps bush foods like fruits and yams to grow, makes new grass for animals to eat and helps prevent large out of control fires, which can be a big problem. Fire is medicine for Wunambal Gaambera country and medicine for their people.

18:59 Desmond Williams: Like at the first starting of the year, we do an early burning. Before coming into the middle of the season, you'll start to see everything change from the brownness to the greenness, you know, you'll start, you know, then straight away that country is getting healthy, healthy again. When you start seeing everything getting green again, and you'll see animals be up and about.

19:26 Eliza Herbert: Unsurprisingly, wrong way fire when it gets big and out of control can also be a threat to our little snail friends.

19:35 Norm McKenzie: We know of hills where a single fire has taken out an entire species. In one event, little limestone hills, strange enough, in the east Kimberley up north of Kununurra. There I've walked across a limestone outcrop that's about 400 metres from the nearest next outcrop. So, they all have an open form of vine thicket on them, and all we could find were dead snails.

20:03 Tom Vigilante: The work that the Rangers are doing is to keep monitoring the islands for these threats to make sure that new threats don't arrive and cause a problem and affect, you know, the biodiversity of the islands, whether it's the snails or whether it's some of the small mammals that are under threat on the mainland like Northern Quolls or Nabarlek Rock Wallabies.

20:26 Eliza Herbert: Wunambal Gaambera have an Uunguu monitoring and evaluation committee made-up of Wunambal Gaambera directors and scientists and other partners, including Bush Heritage. They continuously evaluate the Healthy Country plan to see how it's tracking and adapt with the lessons learned. 2021 represented a massive milestone. Ten years of the plan in action. Wunambal Gaambera are now developing a new plan that will guide the next ten years looking after their remarkable country.

20:55 Tom Vigilante: Around the world, biodiversity is under threat.  There’s a lot of development everywhere and I guess this is one part of the world, where things are still very intact, haven't changed too much in the last couple of hundred years and the snails are a bit of an indication of the significance of the place.

21:14 Frank Koehler: These sails are a national treasure because they are testimony to a very interesting evolutionary story behind, and they tell us something about the history of that landscape. In terms of millions of years of evolution, where the Kimberly basically has escaped all the negative or many of the negative influences that we've seen in other areas of Australia and the world. 

Mostly indigenous people have lived in this landscape for thousands, tens of thousands of years, and have, I think, a much deeper connection to that landscape than we Europeans can even imagine.

22:10 Desmond Williams: It means everything to me. For me and my generation, for the next generation, like being on our country, it's really good and we want our kids to be like that, following our footsteps, following out on country.

22:24 Eliza Herbert: The story of the snails and the islands reiterates the importance of having the right people looking after land, and for me these kooky gastropods are a reminder of just how wacky and wondrous our natural world can be when biodiversity truly thrives.
22:41 Desmond Williams: If you see snails running on those islands, it's really, really healthy, you know.

22:45 Jeremy Kowan: Yeah, all healthy, all good.

22:52 Eliza Herbert: Big Sky Country is a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia, a leading not-for-profit conservation organization, protecting ecosystems and wildlife across the continent. We acknowledge the Traditional Owners on which this episode was produced and recorded and recognize and respect their enduring relationship with their lands and waters. We pay our respects to elders, past and present, and any traditional owners who have listened today.

A special thanks to Wunambal Gaambera Aboriginal Corporation for over ten years of partnership and for helping us share this story. We'd also like to thank and acknowledge the late Wunambal Gaambera traditional owner, Jeffrey Mangalamara, who made prominent contributions to the surveys conducted in the late 80s. To read more about our partnership with Wunambal Gaambera people, visit the “Aboriginal partners” link under the “Our Priorities” menu on the Bush Heritage website or sign up to our newsletter to get the news straight to your inbox.

Thanks to Uunguu Rangers, Jeremy Kowan and Desmond Williams, thanks to our science experts, Frank Koehler and Norm McKenzie, to our Healthy Country manager, Tom Vigilante, and to Victoria, Laurie and Kate Sutton for recording some of these interviews. Thanks to the bushy kids Miller, Casper and Freya for their cute snail facts. And thanks to Wunambal Gaambera people for protecting their country and keeping it strong. This episode was produced by Bee Stephens and myself, Eliza Herbert. Theme music is “Invertebrate City” by the Orbweavers and the audio was mixed ad mastered by Mitch Ansell.

24:12 Bushy Kid 1: Did you know with snails, they actually have their eyeballs on a stick, and with those eyeballs. they can crawl into their bodies.
24:27 Bushy Kid 3: Something cool about snails is that they leave a trail wherever they go.