Due to the fact that of their diminishing population and nighttime habits, extremely little is learnt about these animals’ life process and habits. Wildlife authorities have actually been studying a population in captivity for almost 20 years.

“DOC has been managing this captive population in chilled containers in Hokitika since 2006, when work began to mine the majority of their habitat on the West Coast of the South Island,” the DOC agents stated in a Facebook post “Very little was known about the species before they were taken into captivity.”

Like lots of snails, Powelliphanta are hermaphrodites, implying they have both male and female reproductive organs. P. augusta are long-lived and sluggish to grow, just reaching sexual maturity at around 8 years of ages– which is older for a snail. Fully grown snails typically lay around 5 eggs a year, which can take more than a year to hatch.

“Some of our captive snails are between 25 and 30 years old — in this they’re polar opposites to the pest garden snail we introduced to New Zealand which is like a weed, with thousands of offspring each year and a short life,” Kath Walker, DOC senior science consultant, stated in the declaration.

While the snails’ difficult shells assist to secure them from predation and extreme conditions, they likewise make it challenging to get sperm from one snail into another. “Powelliphanta have solved this by having an opening (a genital pore) on the right side of their body just below their head so that the snail only needs to peek out of its shell to do the business,” Walker stated.

“It extends its penis out of this pore and into its mate’s pore, and its mate does the same, simultaneously exchanging sperm, which they can store until they each fertilise the sperm they’ve received to create eggs,” Walker stated.

She included that, since they have both male and female reproductive organs, the snails can likewise self-fertilize.

Laying eggs through a genital pore prevails amongst snail types, although some types, such as Littorina saxatilis in the U.K., bring to life live young. Powelliphanta types are uncommon since they just lay one egg at a time, instead of the huge eggy clusters produced by lots of other more typical snail types, according to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

To conserve these unique snails, the DOC has actually developed brand-new populations in the wild by presenting them into brand-new and fixed up environments. They will continue to handle populations in captivity too up until they are positive that the types is enduring well in the wild.

“The captive management of Powelliphanta augusta has not only saved the species from extinction, but it’s allowed us to learn more about the lives of these incredible creatures found nowhere else in the world,” according to the declaration.

Pandora is the trending news editor at Live Science. She is likewise a science speaker and formerly worked as Senior Science and Health Reporter at Newsweek. Pandora holds a Biological Sciences degree from the University of Oxford, where she specialised in biochemistry and molecular biology.