Darkness envelops me as I step from the brightly lit marsh into a tree island, a pocket of hardwood hammock within the Everglades. I wait for my eyes to adjust, then begin scanning trees for arboreal snails. These terrestrial mollusks once glistened from nearly every smooth-barked tree in the tropical forests of Cuba, the Florida Keys, and southern mainland Florida, displaying a range of colors and patterns that tantalized scientists and amateur collectors. Competition was intense. Entire hammocks were burned to ensure that no other collection shared the sometimes hammock-specific shell designs. Between such over-collecting and the fact that nearly all South Florida’s native hammocks have fallen prey to bulldozers, it’s not so easy to find liguus tree snails anymore. Fortunately, a handful of concerned shell collectors and early staff at the then newly formed Everglades National Park had the foresight to translocate snails of various color forms into the park’s protected hammocks. Today, more than fifty officially recognized patterns remain in the wild, continuing to earn this snail its nickname of living jewel.

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