What the Shell: Scientists Marvel as NZ Snail Lays Egg from Neck 

This handout picture taken on September 18, 2024 and released by the New Zealand Department of Conservation on May 8, 2025 shows a Mount Augustus snail laying an egg through its neck in Hokitika, New Zealand. (Lisa Flanagan / New Zealand Department of Conservation / AFP)
This handout picture taken on September 18, 2024 and released by the New Zealand Department of Conservation on May 8, 2025 shows a Mount Augustus snail laying an egg through its neck in Hokitika, New Zealand. (Lisa Flanagan / New Zealand Department of Conservation / AFP)
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What the Shell: Scientists Marvel as NZ Snail Lays Egg from Neck 

This handout picture taken on September 18, 2024 and released by the New Zealand Department of Conservation on May 8, 2025 shows a Mount Augustus snail laying an egg through its neck in Hokitika, New Zealand. (Lisa Flanagan / New Zealand Department of Conservation / AFP)
This handout picture taken on September 18, 2024 and released by the New Zealand Department of Conservation on May 8, 2025 shows a Mount Augustus snail laying an egg through its neck in Hokitika, New Zealand. (Lisa Flanagan / New Zealand Department of Conservation / AFP)

A rare New Zealand snail has been filmed for the first time squeezing an egg from its neck, delighting scientists trying to save the critically endangered meat-eating mollusk.

Threatened by coal mining in New Zealand's South Island, a small population of the Mount Augustus snail was transplanted from its forest habitat almost 20 years ago to live in chilled containers tended by humans.

Little is known about the reproduction of the shellbound critters, which can grow so large that New Zealand's conservation department calls them "giants of the snail world".

A conservation ranger said she was gobsmacked to witness a captive snail laying an egg from its neck -- a reproductive act well documented in other land snails but never filmed for this species.

"It's remarkable that in all the time we've spent caring for the snails, this is the first time we've seen one lay an egg," conservation ranger Lisa Flanagan said this week.

"We caught the action when we were weighing the snail. We turned it over to be weighed and saw the egg just starting to emerge from the snail."

Conservation department scientist Kath Walker said hard shells made it difficult to mate -- so some snails instead evolved a special "genital pore" under their head.

The Mount Augustus snail "only needs to peek out of its shell to do the business," she said.

The long-lived snails can grow to the size of a golf ball and their eggs can take more than a year to hatch.

They eat earthworms, according to New Zealand's conservation department, which they slurp up "like we eat spaghetti".

Conservation efforts suffered a drastic setback in 2011, when a faulty temperature gauge froze 800 Mount Augustus snails to death inside their climate-controlled containers.

Fewer than 2,000 snails currently live in captivity, while small populations have been re-established in the New Zealand wild.



Eel-eating Japan Opposes EU Call for More Protection

People on bicycles cross a street under the hot sun in Tokyo on June 20, 2025. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP)
People on bicycles cross a street under the hot sun in Tokyo on June 20, 2025. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP)
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Eel-eating Japan Opposes EU Call for More Protection

People on bicycles cross a street under the hot sun in Tokyo on June 20, 2025. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP)
People on bicycles cross a street under the hot sun in Tokyo on June 20, 2025. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP)

Japan's agriculture minister said Friday the country would oppose any call by the European Union to add eels to an endangered species list that would limit trade in them.

Eel is eaten worldwide but is particularly popular in Japan, where it is called "unagi" and traditionally served grilled after being covered in a sticky-sweet sauce.

Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters that the country carefully manages stock levels of the Japanese eel in cooperation with neighboring China, Taiwan and South Korea.

"There is a sufficient population, and it faces no extinction risk due to international trade," AFP quoted him as saying.

Japanese media have reported that the EU could soon propose that all eel species be added to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) which limits trade of protected animals.

There are 19 species and subspecies of eel, many of them now threatened due to a range of factors including pollution and overfishing.

In 2014, the Japanese eel was listed as endangered, but not critically endangered, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which cited factors including habitat loss, overfishing, pollution and migration barriers.

Protecting the animal is complicated by their complex life cycle, which unfolds over a vast area, and the many unknowns about how they reproduce.