Import cannibal snails that’s the call from Gillian Hollis, owner of Harrington Hill farm, in Smith’s.“Everybody is having such a bad snail problem this year,” she said. Mrs Hollis and her husband Robert operate a commercial plant nursery and are against using toxic chemicals.“We are a specialised nursery of wholesale seedlings and prefer not to use anything that will pollute Bermuda any more than we have to,’ she said. “We pick them off and stamp on them but that is not really doing the trick.”Windy Bank Farm elder, Burt Smith, echoed her call for predatory snails to eat milk snails.“I remember back in the 50s my father had this problem and the Department of Agriculture gave him some little round yellow snails,” he said. “We put those around the field and they worked. They ate up all the other snails. It worked very well and they lasted at least ten years,” he said. “We know they were still around because when we would hoe the ground we would find them in the soil,” he added. “I’d love to get the Department of Agriculture to bring in some more of those.”But it’s unlikely that this will happen. According to Robbie Smith, Curator of the Natural History Museum, introducing those cannibal snails in the 1950s failed.“In the long run it simply did not work,” he said. “We have the same problem today.”Additionally he believes the imported cannibal snails while eating the milk snails, also ate the endemic snails resulting in their absence on the Island today.It is standard protocol in most countries today not to introduce a creature or plant into a foreign environment as a means of eradicating any pest (plant included).Mr Smith said that islands have unique and specific eco-systems and that experience has shown that predictions made on what will happen when a new specie is introduced, have mostly failed.“Islands have a lot of constraints and introductions do not always do what we predict them to,” he said.“We faced this problem in the 50s with biological control, introducing two species from Kenya and one from Cuba and it did not prove effective,” he said. And Bermuda is not alone; Mr Smith said efforts to solve the problem by this means in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, also failed.