When Hurricane Douglas came barreling toward Oahu in 2020, David Sischo quickly packed up and drove to higher ground. But he wasn’t evacuating his family. He was evacuating snails.
Sischo works with some of the rarest endangered species on the planet, kāhuli – Hawaii’s native tree snails. The colorful, jewel-like snails were once so abundant, it’s said they were like Christmas ornaments covering the trees. Almost all of the 750 different species were found only in Hawaii.
Today, more than half of those species are gone, the extinctions happening in the span of a human lifetime. Sischo and his team with Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources have the heavy task of saving what’s left.
To stave off extinction, 40 species of snails, each about the size of a dime, live in human care inside an unremarkable trailer near Honolulu. For some, it’s the only place they’re found, their wild populations having completely disappeared.