The African Giant Snail settles in for good at three Mumbai refuges

Mumbai's fragmented green refuges have a persistent, uninvited resident. The African Giant Snail has been logged 12 times in the past 30 days and 48 times over the past year within protected and semi-protected green spaces bordering the Malabar Coast moist forests, with sightings recurring at the same key sites: Aarey Milk Colony, Mahim Nature Park in Dharavi, and Malabar Hill itself. Records show up nearly every month, three to eight a month, rather than clustering in one burst, which points to an established population rather than snails that wandered in and died out.

This species, native to East Africa, is one of the most widely spread invasive land snails in the world, and it earns that reputation by being a generalist that eats through native seedlings and understory plants, competes directly with smaller native mollusks for food and space, and can carry parasites, including the rat lungworm nematode, that pose a real risk to anyone handling them or eating unwashed produce from infested gardens. In a city where these three sites are already squeezed to a fraction of what once bordered the Malabar Coast forests, a slow-breeding native plant community has little room to absorb sustained grazing pressure from a snail that can lay hundreds of eggs a year and shows no sign of dying back on its own.

None of this shows the population is spreading beyond these sites or getting worse year over year, since recurring sightings can also just mean more people are looking. What the record does show is that the snail is no longer a passing curiosity at Aarey, Mahim, or Malabar Hill. It's a fixture.