Control methods for the flower pest, the similar-shaped gray field snail

Also known as the tingyou snail and the water buffalo snail. It is distributed in Hebei, Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Shaanxi, Hunan, Hubei, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Beijing, Tianjin, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Taiwan, China and other places. It damages many kinds of flowers, such as chrysanthemum, orchid, cockscomb, salvia, hibiscus, canna, hydrangea, dahlia, wintersweet, kumquat, citrus, bergamot, Chinese rose, crape myrtle, rose, climbing rose, Amur honeysuckle, redbud, Chinese peony, tree peony, crabapple and so on.

Damage characteristics

Newly hatched young snails feed only on the leaf mesophyll, leaving the epidermis; once slightly larger, they scrape the leaves and stems with their radula, causing holes or notches, and in severe cases bite through young seedlings, resulting in missing plants. The snail's foot gland can secrete mucus, and wherever it has crawled, band-like, silvery-gray shiny traces are left on leaves, stems and trunks.

Morphological characteristics

Body length about 2 cm, about 2.5 cm when crawling. The head and the back of the front part of the body are pale grayish yellow, and the rear part of the body is grayish white. The body surface has relatively dense, slightly raised grayish white patches. The head is well developed, with 2 pairs of tentacles on the head; the front pair is about 1 mm long and the same color as the body or pale grayish black, and the rear pair is about 4 mm long and grayish black. The eyes are borne at the tips of the rear tentacles and are black. The tentacles can be retracted, and the eyes can also be withdrawn into the body. The mouth is located on the ventral side of the head and has tactile lips. The foot is on the ventral side of the body and is broad, suitable for crawling. Outside the body there is a spiral hard shell, flatly round-spherical, with shell height 12 mm and width 16 mm, and 5-6 whorls. The shell is relatively hard, yellow-brown or red-brown. The spire is low, the body whorl is relatively wide and large, and there is 1 brown band in the middle of the periphery. The aperture is horseshoe-shaped or oval, and the umbilicus is round-hole shaped. Normally the body hides inside the shell; when active and crawling in search of food, it emerges from the shell opening and carries the shell on its back.

Control methods

(1) Remove weeds in protected areas and nearby.

(2) In the evening, in places where snails are often active, scatter stone dust or tea seed cake powder, etc., to poison and kill adults and young snails.

(3) Handpick adults and young snails, or make lure piles with weeds, leaves, vegetable leaves, etc., to attract snails to hide in them, and then capture and kill them.

(4) Dilute ammonia water with water 70-100 times and spray at night, which can poison and kill snails and also fertilize.

(5) Chemical poisoning. You can choose 90% trichlorfon technical material 1000-times solution, 20% jusha emulsifiable concentrate 1200-times solution; broadcast 6% Mida (metaldehyde) granules at 7-10 kg/sq km mixed with 150 kg of sand and soil; 20% snail enemy (metaldehyde) 1:20 with ground soybean cake or corn flour to make poisoned bait, and scatter it in the affected area in the evening for trapping and killing; spray 20% snail enemy liquid, etc., once every 15 days, for 2 consecutive sprays.