Giant African Land Snails - Lissachatina fulica

Sort the calcium before the snail arrives. Everything else about keeping a giant African land snail is forgiving, but the animal is building a shell continuously for its whole life, and a snail short of calcium grows a thin, pitted, easily damaged one. Cuttlebone in the tank permanently, from day one, is the single thing that separates a good specimen from a poor one.

The animal

This is Lissachatina fulica, described by Bowdich in 1822 and still very widely sold under its former name Achatina fulica. Same snail, and both names are worth knowing because the older one is what most of the internet still uses. East African originally, now established across much of the tropics.

The shell is conical and pointed, reddish brown with pale yellowish streaks running down it, banded and high-contrast in young snails and smoothing to a glossier brown with age. Adults carry seven to nine whorls. On size, be careful what you read: a large adult shell runs somewhere between 5 and 12cm, and around 20cm is the realistic ceiling for the species. You will see 30cm quoted in places, including on a university factsheet, and it traces back to somebody converting eight inches wrongly. The famous record-holding giant snail was a different species altogether.

Most last three to six years and the occasional one reaches ten. They are hermaphrodites, and a mature pair will produce eggs in numbers that surprise people, which brings us to the part of this page that matters most.

Your responsibilities, plainly

Keeping and selling these is entirely legal in the UK. No licence applies, No schedule of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act names them, and the register of invasive species of special concern does not name them either. Section 14 of that Act is the part that reaches you: putting a non-native creature out, or letting one get away, is itself the offence. So a secure lid is a legal matter and not merely good practice, and eggs you do not want must be destroyed rather than tipped onto the garden. Freezing the clutch for a day or two is the usual method.

They are illegal to own in the United States, where the federal agriculture inspection service treats the whole group as a plant pest, issues no pet permits, and confiscates and destroys any it finds. Australia prohibits them outright. If you are reading this from outside the UK, check before you buy anything from anyone.

On rat lungworm, the parasite that gets mentioned whenever giant snails come up: it needs an infected rat's droppings to enter a snail in the first place, and a snail bred in a tank in Britain has no route to it. It is not known to be present in UK rats and no case here has ever been traced to a pet snail. Wash your hands after handling, as you would with any animal, and that is the proportionate response.

Setting up

Warm and humid. They stay active between roughly 9 and 29°C but do best around 21 to 25°C, which in a British house means running a heat mat against one wall of the tank for a good part of the year. Above 30°C they seal themselves up and wait it out. Give a deep layer of coir or loam they can burrow into completely, keep it damp rather than wet, and mist to hold humidity up.

Feeding is easy and endlessly variable: leafy greens, cucumber, courgette, carrot, peppers, and most fruit. Keep it varied, take out what is not eaten, and never offer anything salted. Alongside them we keep the much smaller Unicorn Snail, and the rest of the range is in our other invertebrates.

Snails are bedded into moist moss, sealed into a vented tub and cushioned inside a carton walled twice over. Dispatch runs Monday through Thursday and stops there, so nothing we send is ever left waiting in a Sunday depot. Next-day tracked delivery lands before 1pm, and we guarantee every snail reaches you alive.