New Delhi: Could invasive snails save coffee from a devastating pest? While conducting fieldwork in Puerto Rico’s central mountainous region in 2016, ecologists noticed tiny trails of bright orange snail poop on the undersurface of coffee leaves afflicted with coffee leaf rust, the crop’s most economically important pest.
Intrigued, they conducted field observations and laboratory experiments over the next several years and showed that the widespread invasive snail Bradybaena similaris, commonly known as the Asian tramp snail and normally a plant-eater, had shifted its diet to consume the fungal pathogen that causes coffee leaf rust, which has ravaged coffee plantations across Latin America in recent years.
Now the University of Michigan researchers are exploring the possibility that B. similaris and other snails and slugs, which are part of a large class of animals called gastropods, could be used as a biological control to help rein in coffee leaf rust.
“This is the first time that any gastropod has been described as consuming this pathogen, and this finding may potentially have implications for controlling it in Puerto Rico,” says doctoral student Zachary Hajian-Forooshani, lead author of a paper in the journal Ecology.
Hajian-Forooshani, Vandermeer, and Perfecto describe experiments in which a single infected coffee leaf and a single B. similaris snail existed together inside dark containers. After 24 hours, the number of coffee leaf rust fungal spores on the leaves had gone down by roughly 30%.
