Friday, April 01, 2011

Snail Biosecurity - Even in Singapore

A visitor to Singapore sees a lot of hard surfaces and little of the green sites.

Seemingly the island appears as a large building, apartment and mall site.


However, surprisingly, the island does have a few biosecurity issues of concern.


A recent article expresses considerable concern over a snail found in some Singapore green sites, such as plant nurseries and remnant jungle areas.


http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0328-hance_tcs_snail_singapore.html

African land snails are a particular issue of concern to many biosecurity agencies around the world, including Australia. The species in this article is not the normally noted one, but still a potential species of some concern. There are comparison photos in the article.


It is true that plant quarantine is often not an issue of major concern to Singapore, especially for outsiders, but it is for Australia.


The Singapore story seems to implicate plant imports as the source of the snail.


While plant imports to Australia from Singapore are not that common, orchid flowers can be a fairly common passenger item, and there is a history of insects as a free rider on the flowers.


Darwin - watchout for this snail.

3 comments:

Rupali Grover said...

Excellent overview! I liked your way of presentation. And I hoping your best work will

continue in future also. Thanks for sharing this wonderful information with us.

For more information about rural Indian news you can visit to Rural News Updates

Gutsy Living said...

I was wondering how they handle the import of orchids. Is each plant inspected? Now I'm talking about the U.S., where they are very strict too.

surfie999@gmail.com said...

Orchids - as flowers: inspected individually for passenger hand luggage, plants only allowed in sterile flasks generally. For commercial imports a permit needed for flowers normally and with strict conditions that vary on source. Probably a bit more technical than above, but that covers major issues.