Snails on a plane: Australia flies rescue mission to Norfolk Island for a tiny, critically endangered species

The Campbell’s keeled glass-snail is officially extinct, but researchers have ‘high hopes’ that translocation will allow the population to thrive

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n a grey day in early June, a commercial plane landed at Norfolk Island Airport in the South Pacific. Onboard was precious cargo ferried some 1,700km from Sydney: four blue plastic crates with “LIVE ANIMALS” signs affixed to the outside.

Inside were thumbnail-sized snails, hundreds of them, with delicate, keeled shells. The molluscs’ arrival was the culmination of an ambitious plan five years in the making: to bring a critically endangered species back from the brink.

Officially, the Campbell’s keeled glass-snail has met the same fate as the Tasmanian tiger. It was listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list as extinct in 1996.