Pest Slugs and Snails

This monograph on pest slugs and snails reviews the problems they create as plant pests in horticulture, agriculture, and forestry, and also as intermediate hosts for parasitic trematodes, cestodes and nematodes which cause worm diseases in man and domestic animals. Here only those vector snails which inhabit flooded or constantly irrigated fields, water storage reservoirs or farm ponds are considered. Reference is also made to the role of pulmonates as carriers of the agents of disease - viruses, bacteria, fungi and worms' eggs, which may be transmitted to man with inadequately cleaned vegetables and fruit. The use of molluscs as indicators of chemical pollution of soil and water, methods of mass rearing of experimental animals and also marking methods are all discussed, as are threshold limit, critical number and the prognosis of damage in plant protection. A classification, an identification key and a systematic check-list of both pest slugs and snails and their predators are provided. The book reviews the biology, physiology, metabolism, reproduction and dispersal of freshwater and terrestrial gastropods, and also the ecological factors which allow a population explosion to occur, thus increasing the likelihood of damage to crops, or the spread of worm diseases of man and domestic animals. The interaction of parasitic worm larvae and their snail hosts is also discussed. These aspects all form an essential basis for the resolution of problems of control.