Dear Ecologgers, does anyone know how to kill in a humane way land snails and slugs before cutting them in small pieces and digesting them in a pepsin solution? I’m working on a nematod parasite, Parelaphostrongylus tenuis, which uses terrestrial snails and slugs as intermediate hosts and ungulates as final hosts. I would like to digest gastropods to search for the presence of stage three larvae of P. tenuis, so I need to use a technique to kill the gastropods but not the P. tenuis larvae to avoid them to be digested by the pepsin solution.
Clove oil is used as an anesthetic for fish and can be used to euthanize them at high concentration, but I didn’t find any informations about its use in gastropods. Some authors reported using CO2 to euthanize snails. Does anyone have used this technique? Thanks in advance, Maryline Pioz
