HONOLULU, HI — Lonely George, the last tree snail of his kind anywhere on Earth, died alone at a University of Hawaii captive breeding laboratory, altogether without kinship except for the scientists who tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to save his species — Achatinella apexfulva — from extinction. He died on New Year’s Day of old age. He was about 14.

Lonely George’s family was one of Hawaii’s best known and most populous. Big and pretty, the snail was named after Lonesome George, a Pinta Island Galapagos tortoise that was also the last of his species.

The Achatinella apexfulva family dates back to at least 1787, when English sea captain, explorer, and maritime fur trader George Dixon was given a shell on a lei when he docked on O’ahu. Some records dating back to the 19th century claim 10,000 or more snail shells could be collected in a single day.

But with Lonely George’s passing, they exist only in history and lore.

Among those mourning his death is University of Hawaii Professor Emeritus Michael Hadfield, who dedicated much of his career to the conservation of a large group of three snails, including the genus Achatinella, that are unique to Hawaii’s forests and were once “hyper abundant,” he said.

Hadfield’s lab studied the growth of snail populations and, in 1997, rounded up the last 10 known surviving Achatinella apexfulva snails. Although most of them died, Lonely George was born at the lab and researchers tried in vain to find him a mate. Incidentally, snails are hermaphrodites, and researchers assigned George the masculine pronoun, but all that is needed for a snail to reproduce is two adults.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be.

“The extinctions have just been horrendous,” Hadfield told CNN, explaining that at one time, there were about 800 tree snail species in 11 families living on the islands. Three-fourths of them are now extinct, he said.

“There’s no doubt that only 10 or so of those (species) still exist, and none of them will survive in the next 10 years,” Hadfield said.

The Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources called Lonely George’s death “a significant loss to the locals, as he was featured in numerous articles and hundreds of school children have viewed him over the years.”

Rebecca Rundell, an evolutionary biologist with State University of New York who helped care for the late snail and his family, said the loss of Lonely George is a tragedy.

“I’m sad, but really, I’m more angry because this was such a special species, and so few people knew about it,” she told National Geographic.

Lonely George Had An Important Job

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First vanquished by rats, which came to the island by ship, and further threatened by habitat destruction, Achatinella apexfulva snails now join hundreds of other snail species that have disappeared from the Hawaiian islands over the past several decades.

Lonely George’s death and the loss of other once plentiful land snails reverberates across the Hawaiian ecosystem, where land snails have an important job. They eat rotting vegetation, fungi and sometimes the soil itself, leaving behind calcium and other nutrients snail embryos need for shell formation. Snails are then consumed by other predators — such as lizards and snakes, salamanders, birds and mammals — that rely on them for calcium and other dietary needs.

Some biologists think that because tree snails reduce the fungi on leaves and increase fungal diversity, they may protect host trees from disease, according to National Geographic. And some biologists think a healthy population of tree snails might have stopped the current outbreak of Rapid ʻŌhiʻa Death, a new fungal pathogen that is wiping out native trees in Hawaii, the magazine reported.

George’s Cousins Don’t Have Much Time, Either

Invasive species and climate change threaten Lonely George’s surviving cousins in Hawaii, the DLNR said. Most that do remain are in isolated to a single ridge or valley, where they’re easy prey for predators, including the rosy wolfsnail (Euglandina rosea), which was brought to the islands in 1955 to eat giant African snails, but found the native snails to be more palatable.

National Geographic said the rosy wolfsnail has been gobbling down the native species at “an alarming rate” and are moving to higher altitudes — the last safe harbor for Lonely George’s kin — as Hawaii’s rainfall increases and temperatures rise.

“We’ve had populations that have been monitored for over a decade, and they seemed stable … then, within the past two years they’ve completely disappeared,” David Sischo, a wildlife biologist who coordinates the DLNR’s Snail Extinction Prevention Program, told the magazine. “We’ve all broken down and cried in the field.”

Another tree snail species, the rainbow colored Achatinella lila, went extinct in the wild last April and exist now only in laboratories.

“It’s surprisingly devastating,” said Melissa Price, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii who told CNN that she used to see them frequently on hiking trips. “They’ve been disappearing in the last two, three years. The rate of extinction is just really alarming for me.

“This is the story that we’re seeing in every single species, we had to go up to the mountain tops to see them, when they would have been all over the island (in the past).”

Scientists haven’t given up hope of another George sometime in the future. A 2-millimeter snippet of the snail’s foot was collected in 2017 for research purposes and the living tissue remains alive in a deep-freeze container at San Diego’s Frozen Zoo.

“Gene banks are being expanded all over the world,” Hadfield told CNN. “Somewhere, some day, maybe we can use this to re-establish a George.”

Photo courtesy of the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources