THE VARIED ROLES OF SNAILS - National Universities Commission

The thin, quickly leached soils of tropical areas need
enriching of some sort if they must be used for much more
than two or three years. Besides the shells, the meat of the
snails can be used as fertilizers. Primitive peoples in Asia
were known to use disintegrating animal flesh to replenish
the soil as plant growth promoting constituents in depleted
soils. These use snails by putting them in metal oil drums
and allowing them to stand in the hot sun until the snails
died. They were allowed to reach a high degree of
putrefaction. These rotting, maggot infested snails were
then scooped out of the shells. Then the putrid slimy,
odoriferous mess was then added as a fertilizer in farms. It
had been found that crops that benefited from snail
fertilizers had generally better quality. The use of this
process introduced two disadvantages:
1. The inadequately covered oil drums permitted
the escape of fly maggots as a threat to public
health. However modern aquaculture practices
suggest that these maggots could be harvested
and used to feed fish in aquaculture pens thus
reducing giving them positive value.
2. Addition of this and the crushed shells to the soil
moved the soil P H even more strongly in a basic
direction.
This latter disadvantage has been eliminated as it is now
known that when only “liquid” fractions were used by
drawing off and diluting with ten parts of water before
being added to the soil (Peterson, 1957), it becomes
enriched.
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