Two millimetres long and never bred in captivity: Wiltshire rallies for one of Britain's rarest snails

You could lose it under a fingernail. The Desmoulin's whorl snail measures about two millimetres, lives in wet chalk riverbanks, and survives in Wiltshire at just two sites, in Warminster and Pewsey, where surveyors rediscovered it in 2025. Now Longleat and the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, funded through Natural England's Species Recovery Programme, are joining forces to restore its wetland home and attempt something never done before: breeding this snail in captivity, so healthy populations can be released back into the wild. Nobody has ever bred it — which is precisely why the team is starting carefully, habitat first.

SDG 15 · Life on land — Mechanism: institutional program