[Pil-pc-oceania] Flesh eating snail

[permaculture at apollobay.org.au]

This morning in the garden I encountered the biggest land snail I've ever
seen!  
It was happily frollicking over the swampy area, as it had rained... I
picked it up, as I wanted to move it to where it wouldn't get squashed. 

Now, I love snails, and as I was thinking about eating this big snail, it
opened it's mouth, showing it's chitinous teeth and proceeded to eat me!! 
I told it that it wasn't suppose to do that!  It didn't have a conical
shell, it's shell was the size and shape of a golf ball... it was so big!
and it hadn't even reached full maturity yet!  I took it over to my green
vegies... look! yum! vegies!! but it didn't like them... so I placed it on
my hand again and out came the teeth!  I left it in the vegie patch...

Now we do have an indigenous carnivorous black snail down here (Victaphanta
atramentaria) which is native to the Otways, but it's black, and not that
big... this one's shell looked like the common garden snail (helix
aspersa), but it had transparent yellow flesh, a bit like the flesh of
Cepaea hortensia (the yellow artic snail) not like the grey flesh of the
aspersa.  A friend mentioned to me about the giant african flesh eating
snail... but that has a conical shell.

This snail has distracted me no end... I'm suppose to be finishing
grafting, potting up plants and tidying up before I go away, not
researching and writing about flesh eating snails!

Any clues anyone?

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