Ian Hughes and his son, Ben, are driving through the hills of north Wales with an array of homemade animal artefacts rattling around their car: diagrams, plaster casts, hand-printed T-shirts. They finally reach Llyn Tegid – Bala Lake in English – where, knee-deep in the water, Ian brandishes two glutinous snails.
It is a mollusc the size of a fingertip. It is also one of Europe’s most endangered species, which Ian has dedicated himself to protecting. “It’s beyond passion,” he says. “It’s an obsession.”
Glutinous snails get their name for the gelatinous, golden-flecked tissue that protects their shell. Because they live in low-calcium habitats, the shell is extremely delicate, and so Hughes uses a fine paintbrush to move them from one place to another.
The snails have been driven to extinction in England due to the poor quality of the country’s freshwater bodies. Pollutants from agriculture and industry have ruined their habitats in English ponds, ditches, lakes and streams. The lake in Gwynedd in which Hughes is partially submerged hosts the last remaining wild population of glutinous snails in Britain.
Hughes has dedicated more than a decade to conserving the tiny mollusc and other rare species, often with only his enthusiastic family for help. This year, however, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has listed the snail as one of the threatened species that will benefit from a £60m government funding boost.
Hughes’s conservation journey began with an interest in art as a teenager. “I always used to draw as an escape. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was quite shy,” he says.
Noticing his talent, the natural history museum in Wollaton Hall, Nottingham, offered him an apprenticeship as a taxidermist and display artist. From there he went on to work in zoos, specialising in invertebrates, before Natural England began funding his solo conservation projects.
In 2014, when Hughes first came to Llyn Tegid to find glutinous snails, he was joined by the second of his three sons, George. Since then, at least one of the boys has always accompanied him on his trips.
When his father asked him to help out with the glutinous snails, George, then 18, quickly agreed, not realising it would involve putting on a wetsuit and wading into a lake.
“It was very cold, but lots of fun,” George recalls.
After taking water samples and depth measurements, father and son built and installed shell-shaped concrete refuges for the snails. It was tough work, but, says George: “The joy of it is that we get to spend so much time together as a family.”
By Christmas that year, the snails had settled into their refuges, and Hughes had a reliable source from which he could collect specimens to take home to Llanarth, west Wales, for breeding.
Now, Hughes’ conservatory is his ark: amid plaster casts of gorillas and a sculpture of Charles Darwin, he breeds the snails and other rare invertebrates in homemade tanks. It has variously been a refuge for scarlet malachite beetles, ladybird spiders and tadpole shrimp.
Each species has its own particular needs, Hughes says, and the way to get ahead of extinction for the snails is to keep them moving.
“If one snail dies in a tank, or two or three die in a pond, they pollute the water,” he explains. “So we’re continually moving snails from one container to another, preserving that part of the population.”
Over the years, Hughes has encouraged zoos to develop their own ark populations and reintroduce glutinous snails to new locations in the wild. But people are not always as easy to work with as animals, and he knows from previous rewilding projects how quickly a new colony can fail without constant attention.
Now Hughes hopes the new Defra funding will help the conservation efforts he has long championed. The British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums will receive more support to build ark populations of the glutinous snail, while the Freshwater Habitats Trust hopes to use new resources to find locations suited to wild reintroductions.
Hughes passion for invertebrates extends to convincing other people to care about them, too. He writes children’s books, which Ben illustrates, about the species he’s studied, and the pair also sell T-shirts, screen-printed by Hughes’ wife, Kerry, showcasing their wildlife drawings.
“We try to [sell them at] places where we’ll get people who aren’t already into nature,” says Hughes.
Ben is long convinced, of course. Asked why even the smallest species matter, he replies without hesitation: “Well, why do we matter? We’re part of a huge living system. If you take a cog out of a machine, it doesn’t work any more.”