The Banff Snail

Shortly after the Japan earthquake, and while NATO was debating on whether to enforce a no fly zone over Libya, the Calgary Herald had a front page story on the Banff Snail.

The Banff Snail, for those of you who do not read the Herald, is an endangered mollusk who inhabits the streams around Banff’s Hot Springs. The unusually hot water, supports this rare little creature. A few years ago, the Park officials noticed that the snail was dying out in some parts of the area. This led them to close down the heritage bath house at the Cave and Basin and move the baths up to Sulphur Mountain. Or so the story goes.

The new spa is nice, but very small, and it feels, on busy days, a little like being at a mall. Hot springs can be very disappointing. The managed and finessed ones that is. They stink of chemicals and attract unhealthy people along with unruly parents with equally unruly children.

Besides attracting the unhealthy and unruly, hot springs create fragile ecosystems, creating or attracting species that grow nowhere else than in this unique confluence of events. I have heard of an orchid that only grows near one particular hot spring that attracts a hummingbird that has uniquely evolved to feed on this particular flower. Although it is not as attractive as an orchid or a hummingbird, the Banff snail is a rare and endangered species that lives in a incredibly fragile environment,

There are a few biologists in Banff who have made it their lives work to study this snail. They report that the hot springs are cooling down, and as a result, the snails are dying out. I also discovered that as I sat in this hot spring pool—when it was minus thirty degrees out—the pool had been heated with tap water. Tap water? I could have gone home and had a bath, without putting up the unwashed hordes and wasted fewer resources, and wouldn’t have got some weird fungal infection on my feet.

So the story about the snail, was as much about the hot springs cooling off as it was about the snail dying out. Anyway, as I walked into the staff kitchen, a co-worker sees the article on the front page and she says, “With the earthquake in Japan, and civil war throughout the Middle East, who cares about a snail?”