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everywhere,” says Mark.
    The giant African land snail was on a watch list of potential threats, so the fruit fly trapper grabbed a few and sent them up to the department’s resident snail expert, who confirmed that same day they were indeed giant African land snails. The following morning, the department descended on the area en masse, sending in every one of its fifty-odd South Florida inspectors to hunt for snails. In house after house, they found snails by the hundreds.
    The area became known as Core 1, a mile-radius zone around the Cuban sisters’ home. It was the ground zero of the second snail invasion of Miami. By the end of the year, fourteen outbreak zoneshad been found throughout the city from Little Haiti and Hialeah to Coral Gables and South Miami Heights. By the start of 2014, twenty-five cores had been discovered.
    How the snails got into Miami this time isn’t known, but the leading theory is that they were brought there for use in Santería or, most likely, Yorùbá rituals. Yorùbá is one of the traditional religions of Nigeria, the native home to the giant African land snail. The mollusk has a starring role in the faith’s creation story. The gist is that the deity Obàtálá used a snail shell filled with loose earth to transform the world from marsh to solid land. Fittingly, he used a chicken to spread the earth around the world.
    When Yorùbá believers were brought as slaves to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean, the slave masters banned them from practicing the religion and insisted they follow Catholicism instead. The result of this forced merger of Yorùbá and Catholicism was Santería. “In the practice of Santería, snails are an important part,” says Mark. “They foretell your health, spirituality, and prosperity. But there were no giant African land snails in Cuba, so the Yorùbá practitioners and the Santería practitioners used any common snail that was available. But stricter Yorùbá practitioners use giant African land snails, so there is a theory that Yorùbá practitioners may have brought these in and they got out of control.”
    There are precedents that support the theory. US Customs and Border Protection once caught a woman coming back from Nigeria at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport who had snails hidden under her dress. Another time a man stopped at LAX was found to have giant African land snails lurking in every pocket of his suit.
    In Miami itself, police launched an investigation in 2010 into a Yorùbá practitioner who had convinced his followers that the snails could cure them of their aliments. He held the creatures of over their heads and then cut them so his followers could drink the “curative” mucus. The police got involved after the snail juice drinkers began complaining of violent illness.
    It’s unlikely, however, that the original source of the current outbreak will ever be conclusively determined. “We would certainly like to say here’s definitively how they got here, but in reality we will probably never know,” says Mark.
    Despite the large scale of the outbreak, Mark is confident the snails will be eradicated. The department’s fast reaction and a major billboard campaign urging people to “Look for it! Report it!” seems to be paying dividends. The rate at which new cores are being found has slowed dramatically, and the newest sites seem to have far fewer snails within them. In the meantime, the department is preparing to bring in its latest weapon against the snails: Labradors trained to sniff out snails hidden in the undergrowth that human eyes may miss.
    â€œThe awareness campaign means we are getting to them sooner, before they are able to establish a huge population,” says Mark. “The idea is we need to get to the point where we are not finding any more snails, dead or alive. Then we still have to go two more