Everyone thought climate change killed off this amazing snail. They were wrong

Seven years ago this tiny pink and purple striped snail was declared extinct. Given up for dead. Written off. Gone FOREVER.

The last time anyone had spotted the Aldabra banded snail, which was endemic to the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Seychelles until it apparently kicked it, was back in 1997.

Scientists concluded it had gone the way of the Dodo. Its apparent extinction caused a stir at the time. Experts blamed declining rainfall in the region for its untimely demise, leading some to declare the mollusk one of the first casualties of climate change.

But on Aug. 23, a research team from the Seychelles Islands Foundation (SIF), which is responsible for the protection of the Seychelles’ World Heritage Sites, made a surprising discovery.

As if a magician had uttered the word abracadabra, the Aldabra reappeared, very much alive and crawling. Researchers counted a total of seven of the stripey critters on Aldabra Atoll’s Malabar Island.

Shane Brice, a junior skipper on the trip, made the initial discovery.

“I was bush-bashing through the scrub when I spotted a mysterious snail that I’d never seen before on the island. I was very excited,” Brice said. It’s lucky he didn’t step on it.

Mollusk experts Vincent Florens and Pat Matyot later confirmed the snail’s identity.  

Catherina Onezia, a senior ranger and assistant training officer for the SIF, said the team was "going crazy" with excitement.

"It shows that Aldabra has a lot of secrets still, and hopefully (we) will continue to find interesting things," Onezia said.

The announcement on the SIF’s homepage was similarly ecstatic: “Extinct snail re-discovered at Aldabra!!!!!!!!!!”

Conservationists around the world are also celebrating the miraculous discovery. While the snail doesn’t appear to play a very important role in the functioning of the ecosystem, it could one day prove useful to humans. Just like mold.

"Could we live without this little snail? Almost certainly," said Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecology professor at Duke University.

"But we simply do not know what species are going to do for us in an economic sense. Probably from the time that somebody baked the first loaf of bread, a housewife said, 'I hate bread mold and I wish it would disappear forever.' And of course we know the scientific name of bread mold is penicillin."

The Aldabra has joined a growing group of so-called Lazarus species thought to have gone extinct only to be rediscovered dozens, hundreds, even millions of years later.

Another animal thought to have left us is the Bornean rainbow toad, which disappeared from the face of the planet for 87 years. The bright-colored amphibian was rediscovered in Western Sarawak in 2011.

The Hula painted frog, endemic to the Hula Lake in northern Israel, was put in the same category in 1996 only to be rediscovered in 2011.

Measuring half a yard long, the slow-moving giant lizard — which is endemic to La Gomera, one of the islands in the Canary Islands — shouldn’t be hard to spot. But the wily reptile evaded detection for hundreds of years until it was discovered in 2000. Scientists only knew it existed because they had seen its fossilized remains.

The coelacanth fish was thought to have disappeared along with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but was rediscovered in 1938 off the east coast of Africa. Measuring up to 6.5 feet long — the size of a pretty tall person — and weighing as much as 198 lbs, the deep-sea fish likes to swim at depths of up to 2,300 feet, which might explain why it evaded detection for so long.

What was thought to be the last Takahe, a large flightless bird endemic to New Zealand, was killed and mounted as a museum specimen in the late 19^th century. At least, that’s what everyone believed for decades. But in 1948 the bird was discovered scratching around the Fiordland wilderness on the South Island.