# The Glutinous Snail: One Lake Left > Europe's rarest freshwater snail is smaller than a fingertip, wears its own mantle over its shell like a coat of clear jelly, and in the wild in Britain now lives in exactly one place: Llyn Tegid in North Wales. - **Canonical URL:** https://skemr.com/experience/glutinous-snail - **Category:** Education & Learning - **Curated by:** SKEMR AI - **Contents:** 4 journeys, 6 chapters, 19 sources - **Last updated:** 2026-09-12 ## What this is A curated transmedia experience: existing web sources selected and ordered by an editor. SKEMR does not host the underlying content — each item links to its original publisher. Journeys are alternative routes through the same material. ## Journeys ### The Whole Story The animal, the lake, what went wrong, the man who bred them, the zoos holding the spares, and the organisations behind all of it. Start here. - Steps: 13 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/glutinous-snail/journeys/j-story - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/glutinous-snail/journeys/j-story/briefing.md ### Why This Snail Is Fragile The biology and the chemistry. A mantle that absorbs everything, a diet of thin algal film, no dormancy option — and why that combination makes the animal a measuring instrument for water quality. - Steps: 11 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/glutinous-snail/journeys/j-science - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/glutinous-snail/journeys/j-science/briefing.md ### The People Doing It One ecologist with 2,000 snails in a greenhouse, five zoos, a forty-year-old charity, a regulator and a trust with a 2050 deadline. Conservation as it actually looks rather than as it is filmed. - Steps: 13 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/glutinous-snail/journeys/j-people - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/glutinous-snail/journeys/j-people/briefing.md ### The Lake That Holds Two Llyn Tegid on its own terms. The largest natural lake in Wales holds the last wild glutinous snails and the only gwyniad on Earth — and both have already needed evacuating to somewhere else. - Steps: 11 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/glutinous-snail/journeys/j-lake - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/glutinous-snail/journeys/j-lake/briefing.md ## Chapters - **Europe's Rarest Freshwater Snail** — Myxas glutinosa. Thirteen to sixteen millimetres tall, a delicate gold-flecked brown shell, unusually large antennae, and an almost transparent mantle it draws up over the whole shell as it moves, so it looks glassy and feels sticky. That mantle is both the name and the problem. - **One Lake in North Wales** — Llyn Tegid, or Bala Lake — the largest natural body of water in Wales, 3.7 miles long, glacial, fed and drained by the River Dee. A Ramsar wetland and an SSSI. It is also the only home of another species found nowhere else on Earth, and that one is in trouble for a different reason. - **Why It Vanished** — Not hunting, not habitat clearance — nutrients. Fertiliser and sewage run into fresh water, algae bloom, oxygen crashes. A snail that absorbs through its mantle, grazes only thin algal mats and cannot wait out a bad season has nowhere to go. Which is exactly what makes its presence worth measuring. - **A Greenhouse in Ceredigion** — In 2017 Ian Hughes took ten snails and started breeding them. It took four months of care before eggs appeared — and as far as anyone knows, nobody had knowingly seen glutinous snail eggs before. He now keeps roughly 2,000 in homemade tanks in his back garden, and every ark population in Britain descends from that work. - **The Arks** — Five zoos now hold insurance populations: Dudley Zoo and Castle, Chester Zoo, Longleat, Wingham Wildlife Park and Askham Bryan. The aim is reintroduction to wild sites within about three years, backed by a £60m UK government species scheme. Spreading the risk is the entire point — one lake is one bad summer away from nothing. - **Who Holds the Line** — Behind one man with tanks sits a quieter infrastructure: a freshwater charity nearly forty years old, the Welsh environment regulator that governs the lake, and a trust trying to pull fifty species back from the edge by 2050. None of it is glamorous and all of it is load-bearing. ## Sources - [Myxas glutinosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxas_glutinosa): The species record. 13-16mm tall, 11-15mm wide, in the pond snail family Lymnaeidae. The defining feature is the mantle it extends over the shell when moving, which makes it look like wet glass. It needs pollution-free, very clear, calm, calcium-rich water. IUCN lists it as Data Deficient — which so... - [Pond Snails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymnaeidae): Useful context for why this one is fragile. Lymnaeidae are air-breathing freshwater snails — pulmonates, with a lung rather than gills, despite living underwater. The family is enormously variable in shell shape and remarkably uniform in anatomy, because most of that variation is the environment act... - [Llyn Tegid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llyn_Tegid): The largest natural lake in Wales: 3.7 miles by half a mile, 138 feet deep, glacial, in Gwynedd. The River Dee runs through it and it has regulated that river's flow since the 1800s. Designated a Ramsar wetland in November 1991 and an SSSI. Read the water-quality section carefully — cyanobacteria bl... - [The Gwyniad — The Lake's Other Endemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwyniad): A whitefish in the salmon family found naturally nowhere on Earth but Llyn Tegid, and listed as Endangered. Ruffe introduced in the 1980s began eating its eggs and fry. The response is the same logic as the snail arks: between 2003 and 2007 gwyniad eggs were moved to Llyn Arenig Fawr, a nearby reser... - [Ruffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruffe): The fish that forced the gwyniad rescue. A small European perch relative, 10-13cm, introduced to Llyn Tegid in the 1980s. What makes it such an effective invader is arithmetic and sensing: a single female lays 130,000 to 200,000 eggs a year and matures in two to three years, and its vibration-detect... - [Eutrophication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication): The mechanism behind almost every freshwater extinction story in Britain. Nutrients accumulate — fertiliser runoff, untreated sewage, animal waste — and in fresh water it is usually phosphorus that drives it. Algae bloom, shade out the bottom-dwellers, then die and consume the oxygen as they decompo... - [Indicator Species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indicator_species): Why a snail nobody has heard of is worth £60m of anyone's attention. A bioindicator reveals the qualitative state of an environment through its own condition — and freshwater macroinvertebrates are the classic case, because they are almost always present, easy to sample, and vary predictably in poll... - [The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_and_Countryside_Act_1981): The legal basis of the snail's protection. The Act protects native species, controls release of non-native ones, and underpins SSSIs. Protected animals sit on Schedule 5, and the JNCC coordinates a compulsory review of that schedule every five years so species can be added as the evidence changes —... - [Ex Situ Conservation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_situ_conservation): The formal name for what a greenhouse full of tanks in Ceredigion actually is. Ex situ conservation moves part of a population out of a threatened habitat to somewhere safer, to hold genetic reserves for eventual reintroduction. The management problems are specific: minimising mean kinship, avoiding... - [A Species on the Cusp of Extinction](https://freshwaterhabitats.org.uk/news/glutinous-snail-a-species-on-the-cusp-of-extinction/): Freshwater Habitats Trust on the decline, and the best single explanation of why this animal in particular. It was previously found in Kent, Surrey, East Anglia, the Thames Valley, Lincolnshire and Cumbria, and fell away sharply through the twentieth century. Three compounding vulnerabilities: the g... - [BIAZA — Restoring the Glutinous Snail to Britain](https://biaza.org.uk/projects/detail/restoring-the-glutinous-snail-to-britain): The project record from the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums, and the clearest account of who is actually doing what. Four new ark populations across member zoos, with Ian Hughes and Lifeforms Art providing the expertise. Note how specific the support is: JCS Livestock funded coll... - [Freshwater Habitats Trust](https://freshwaterhabitats.org.uk/): The UK's leading freshwater charity, running for nearly forty years, with the stated aim of reversing the decline of freshwater biodiversity by building a national network of wilder, cleaner, connected fresh waters. The numbers give a sense of the scale of the monitoring problem: 25,000 freshwaters... - [Natural Resources Wales](https://naturalresources.wales/guidance-and-advice/environmental-topics/wildlife-and-biodiversity/?lang=en): The regulator whose remit covers Llyn Tegid. NRW handles protected areas on land and at sea, species licensing, and invasive species — which in this lake means both the ruffe already present and whatever arrives next. Any reintroduction of the snail to a wild Welsh site runs through their licensing,... - [The Species Recovery Trust](https://www.speciesrecoverytrust.org.uk/): A small Salisbury charity with an unusually concrete target: remove 50 species from the edge of extinction in the UK by 2050, by working on both the species and the habitats. They helped with planning on the snail taskforce. Their framing of the wider problem is the sobering bit — over nine hundred... - [Dudley Zoo and Castle](https://www.dudleyzoo.org.uk/animal/glutinous-snail/): One of the ark holders, and a good example of what a zoo actually contributes here. Their species page describes the animal plainly — 13-16mm, a delicate shell under an almost transparent jelly-like mantle — records the Data Deficient status and the extinction in England, and names the threats as wa... - [Chester Zoo](https://www.chesterzoo.org/): The largest of the ark holders, and worth seeing at scale. A registered charity across 130 acres describing itself as a national conservation zoo, with over 30,000 animals from more than 500 species, working with 62 organisations in over 20 countries. Their stated targets include training 5,000 addi... - [Battle to Save the Tiny, Gooey Snail](https://ca.news.yahoo.com/battle-save-tiny-gooey-snail-213820733.html): The BBC's report by Steffan Messenger, Wales environment correspondent, 12 September 2026 — syndicated here because bbc.co.uk blocks automated access. This is where the human detail lives. Hughes on the eggs: nobody had knowingly seen them before that breakthrough, which came after four months of ca... - [Lifeforms Art](https://lifeformsart.co.uk/): The other half of Ian Hughes's work, and an unusual funding model. A Welsh family business in Ceredigion selling hand-drawn nature designs on clothing, stationery and prints, with a share of sales going back into conservation. Their listed projects are all invertebrates nobody else is fighting for:... - [Llyn Tegid — Photographs](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Llyn_Tegid): 282 freely-licensed files on Wikimedia Commons across six subcategories, including the lake in art and the Bala Lake Railway that runs along its shore. Useful for the thing statistics cannot convey: this is an ordinary-looking, beautiful, well-visited Welsh lake with a narrow-gauge railway beside it... ## Attribution Curated by SKEMR. The underlying content belongs to the linked publishers. Please cite the source URLs rather than SKEMR for factual claims.