A species of snail with a taste for old buildings has been found in
Britain, 112 years after it probably arrived here from Italy, several
papers report.
As the Independent's science editor Steve Connor puts it: "They have
survived two world wars, a sex scandal and the feet of thousands of
visitors to the Berkshire country house of Cliveden, to conduct what must be the slowest invasion of Britain by an alien species."
The accidental import of a colony of Papillifera papillaris, secreted in a marble balustrade brought over from the Villa Borghese in Rome in 1896, went unnoticed for generations. But the immigrants' descendants have not chosen to move far; just 27 metres, or about 25cm a year.
The articles amount to the best paean to molluscs since the magnificent My Snails Have Not Yet Arrived Les Barker's comic poem as performed by Prunella Scales and Timothy West.
Their lack of pace is legendary and, as another more recent Italian arrival to these shores, the concept of "Cittaslow", a slow town or city, following their example, if not to the point of near-immobility may do much to improve our quality of life.
What else can we learn from snails?
This is an extended extract from the Wrap, theguardian.com's round-up of the morning's papers
