Abstract

Land snails are known to have strong association with soil, serving as an important part of their ecosystem. Several researches had seldom been conducted on the performance of giant African land snails (GALs) in relation to environment that lack soil. This probably may be due to the mere fact that no bases for their separation (soil and snail) reasonably seem to be justifiable. However, with increasing soil pollution, prevalent in our society, there may be need to rear snails in a non-soil media, especially where no good soil exist. This study aimed at determining the performance of GALs reared on different enclosure media. The duration of the experiments was 56 days during which the growth performance of 24 juvenile snails (A. marginata) divided into 8 units of identical baskets (4 snails/basket) were studied on different media; soil containing medium (SCM) and non-soil containing medium (NCM) acting as control (3 baskets/Treatment). The result indicated a significant difference (P<0.05) in GALs present inSCM with a total mean body weight gain of 24.25 g and a daily body weight gain of 0.43 g thereby indicating a better growth performance than that of GALs in NCM, which had a total mean body weight gain of 6.05 g and a daily body weight gain of 0.11 g. Though, GALs in both media showed no significant difference (P>0.05) in the growth performance of the length and width. The result therefore indicated that GALs may not grow well in the absent of soil media.