Apparently, at a rowdy meeting on the 15 July 2011, ‘Pagham residents and business owners packed out the village hall to protest that this snail would prevent them from strengthening sea defences and jeopardize tourism’ – though who goes there selleck chemicals as a tourist is a mystery to me. Actually, the adjoining Pagham Harbour is already a local nature reserve managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust and does attract some tourists. But this is not what the villagers are moaning about. The problem lies in history. After the Second World War, planning restrictions, especially local ones,

were minimal and certain people thought it would be a jolly good idea to build summer homes on the bank of shingle, seaward of the original Pagham, which protected the village from the sea. Over time these have become permanent ‘homes’. As discussed in an earlier editorial (Morton,

2007), local coastal erosion and changing patterns of inshore sea currents are causing problems with Pagham’s protective shingle bank and, as a result, it and the houses atop it have to be repeatedly strengthened and safeguarded, respectively, at no small cost to the public purse. This strengthening means destruction of Defolin’s lagoon snail habitat (if it has not happened already); more importantly, the Government has said that it literally cannot keep on reinforcing, at huge cost, an area of naturally

eroding coastline that is doomed to be drowned Smad activation by the sea one day anyway. In addition to DeFolin’s lagoon snail, there are many other protected lagoon species, all tiny. Other British species, which are virtually exclusive to saline lagoons as at Pagham, are four species of stoneworts, namely, the Baltic (Chara baltica), bearded (C. canescens), foxtail (Lamprothamnium papulosum) and bird’s nest (Tolypella nidifica). In addition, there are 10 species of lagoonal animal protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Liothyronine Sodium Act, that is, the starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis), Ivell’s sea anemone (Edwardsia ivelli) (thought to be already globally extinct), the trembling sea mat (Victorella pavida), the lagoon sandworm (Armandia cirrhosa), the tentacled lagoon worm (Alkmaria romijni), a hydroid (Clavopsella navis), the lagoon snail (Paludinella littorina), the lagoon sand shrimp (Gammarus insensibilis), the lagoon seaslug (Tenellia adspersa) and the Bembridge water beetle (Paracymus aeneus). If DeFolin’s lagoon snail is allowed to depart this Earth, then the above species would not be far behind it for the very simple reason that in crowded Great Britain, and especially England, coastal lagoons have virtually all but disappeared already and, as the snail demonstrates, the survivors are not far behind.