An African snail the size of a baseball was found a long way from home when workers at a Brisbane, Australia shipping container yard found the giant creature slowly slipping across the ground there.
Anyone who has eaten escargot knows snails as little, bite-sized morsels, so the notion of a more than nine-inch mollusk might be a little hard to swallow.
Workers at the Brisbane container yard called the Australian Department of Agriculture after seeing the snail, which was identified as a giant African snail, a species that can grow up to a foot long and weigh more than two pounds, Reuters reported.
The giant snail is seen as an invasive species because it is known to eat up to 500 different types of crops, fruits, native Australian plants and even other giant African snails, the report stated.
"Giant African snails are one of the world's largest and most damaging land snails," said Paul Nixon, acting regional manager at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, said in a press statement.
The snails can live up to nine years and lay as many as 1,200 eggs in a year, Australian site ABC News reported. Because the snail is a hermaphrodite, a population of the invasive species can spread quickly even with just one snail.
"They are essentially a male-female all-in-one so they can essentially lay eggs without the need for any other snail," Nixon said.
Officials "humanely destroyed" the snail, which is known to be one of the world's largest and most damaging species of land snail, and found no evidence of other snails or snail eggs.
In 2011 thousands of the snails were found in a residential community in Florida.
"They leave excrement all over the sides of houses. They're very nasty," the director of Florida's Division of Plant Industry said at the time, according to UPI. "These things are not the cute little snails that you see."
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