The ICE Detention Center and the Snail

OK, listen up!  It seems likely to me that the title of this month’s essay may attract more than the usual trickle of casual surfers and random googlers to this arcane little crack in the internet.  You new visitors and guests will not find anything newsworthy in the paragraphs that follow, nor any information relevant to any ongoing controversy, nor anything interesting, entertaining, nor probably even intelligible.  And absolutely no politics!  This is a blog post written by a snail scientist, for snail scientists.  Everybody else, please go away.  You’re scaring us.

Now for my colleagues still remaining, all six of you all.  Here is the background.  In the late morning of Wednesday 1Apr26 [1] I missed two phone calls but did successfully receive a voicemail and a follow-up email from one Ms. Maddi O’Neill with the subject line, “Media request on deadline.”  In her email, Ms. O’Neill identified herself as a freelance journalist based in Baltimore. And here, verbatim, is the background she supplied, which is really all I know about the political controversy to this day:

“I'm working on a story about a proposed ICE detention center in Washington County, Maryland, and the state of Maryland's effort to block its construction through litigation. Maryland's lawsuit hinges on the need for an Environmental Impact Statement, which the feds have not completed, and points to possible harms to state-endangered species and species in need of conservation that live near the proposed detention center site. Specifically, the state references [2] … the Appalachian springsnail, and I was wondering if you'd be open to speaking with me for a story.”

A quick google search on my part reminded me [3] that the “Appalachian springsnail” is Fontigens bottimeri.  For background on the biology of that obscure little black speck of a gastropod see the FWGNA [species page], and for contextualization see my essays of [9Aug22] and [12Feb26].

At the Hopewell Road entrance.

So I returned Ms. O’Neill’s phone call right away, and we arranged a convenient time for a telephone interview a couple days later, Friday morning 3Apr26.  In the interim, I did a bit of homework – googling up more info on the proposed ICE Detention Center, located on a 54-acre site in the crotch of I-81 and I-70, just north of Williamsport. 

I initially labored under the false impression that the feds were proposing to construct a new facility.  But in fact, their proposal was to repurpose an 800,000 square foot warehouse already on that site, newly constructed (on speculation? really?) but never used [7].  The monstrosity was large enough to have two addresses: 10900 Hopewell Road and 16220 Wright Road.

And digging through the FWGNA database, I found a Fontigens bottimeri record in the Smithsonian (USNM-874706) collected by one D. Feller in 1991 from “Kemps Spring No. 4,” the lat/long coordinates of which (39.6136, -77.8136) mapped just a half mile East of 16220 Wright Road.  I also took the opportunity to email my buddy Matt Ashton at the Maryland DNR for his input but received no response [8].

I really enjoyed getting to know Ms. Maddi O’Neill, however, in our roughly 30-minute telephone conversation Friday.  It turned out that she herself was planning a field trip to hunt Fontigens in the waters around the proposed detention center.  I like that sort of positive mental attitude.  I did my best to help her over the phone, emphasizing that Fontigens populations are restricted [9] to springs and spring runs – cold, clear, pristine 100% groundwater.

And I was pleased to receive a couple follow-up texts from Ms. O’Neill Sunday afternoon 12Apr26, apparently in the field, asking for the lat/long coordinates of Kemps Spring #4, and following with several photos of individual Lymnaea humilis perched on her finger. Bless her heart!

So on 27Apr26 she texted me a link to her article, newly published in an online magazine called “Slate,” [html].  I found the article behind a paywall.  But I was so curious to read it that I ponied up the dough for a three-month subscription, so I could copy-and-paste the text into a [pdf] document, here:

An Ingenious New Strategy for Blocking ICE Detention Warehouses Depends on a Minuscule Snail, by Madeleine O’Neill.

Spoiler alert!  Our friend Maddi did not find any Fontigens bottimeri.  But by that point I had already made plans to drive up I-81 to Williamsport and do the survey right.

I laid out a sampling scheme with five sites down Semple Run (A, B, C, D, F), the little stream just beneath the gigantic warehouse at 16220 Wright Road.  I had also noticed, using the yellow man on Google street view, what looked like an old springhouse by Wright Road not 100 yards down the hill from 16220 (E). And of course, I dropped a pin (G) on 39.6136, -77.8136.  At which coordinates I could find no evidence of a spring on any map available to me.  Satellite imagery seemed to suggest that point was in somebody’s back yard.

So the bright sunny morning of Tuesday, 5May26, found me touring around the besieged little valley of Semple Run.  And the first entry into my field notebook was this: “Semple Run low and clear over silt and debris. 150 years a ditch through ag fields, a ditch under the interstate thereafter.”

Marl falls at Site (D).

From the topo maps, it had seemed possible to me that Semple Run might bear a lot higher proportion of groundwater than it actually carries here in the 21st Century.  The current picked up speed downstream, over a cobble bottom, with some marl.  But alas, at no point was the environment fit for Fontigens, headwaters to mouth [10].  I found patchy populations of the usual Physa (both acuta and gyrina) and Maddi’s Lymnaea (Galba) humilis in the five sample sites I had marked down its length, and (quite unexpectedly) a couple individual Helisoma trivolvis, doing the anceps job.  Period.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, the Wright Road springhouse (E) was bone dry, alas again.  The ground was boggy below the springhouse, on the other side of Wright Road, no habitat for Fontigens in evidence.

Springhouse at Site (E).

And what of Kemps Spring #4?  I parked at the south end of Celeste Drive, walked over the railroad tracks, and knocked on the door of the lovely c1820 brick farmhouse at 39.6136, -77.8136, repeatedly.  And a dog inside barked loud enough to wake the dead.  And nobody came to the door.  So, I let myself through the gate into the back yard and toured around, finding no evidence of spring nor springhouse.

Ultimately a nice lady, in her dishabille (as my mother used to say) came out to greet me [11].  She confirmed that no spring exists on her property, nor has any spring ever existed in that neighborhood to her knowledge, although she was familiar with the dry springhouse at Wright Road, on the other side of the tracks.  It seems likely to me that the dry springhouse at site (E) was indeed built over Kemps Spring #4, with an error of 0.0012 degrees latitude and 0.0070 degrees longitude.

Big farmhouse at Site (G).

“Lovely farmland spoiled.”  That’s the last note in my field book for the morning of May 5, 2026.  And back at the truck, as I shucked off my boots, it occurred to me that same observation would apply equally to the country around my own hometown of Waynesboro, two hours south, in the same sprawl that has enveloped the country around Williamsport.  And indeed, sadly, the Great Valley of Virginia.  And as one of my favorite philosophers once observed, “If this valley is lost, Virginia is lost.”  And if Virginia is lost, what of America?

Notes:

[1] Yes, the thought that this might be an April Fool’s joke did occur to me.

[2] Ms. O’Neill also mentioned “the brook floater mussel, the green floater mussel,” as well as “a few species of fish.”

[3] Somewhat startlingly, the “AI overview” at the top of my google results for “Appalachian springsnail” referred back to me, myself, in a pdf document I posted on my own FWGNA site for the Commonwealth of Virginia back in 2011 [pdf].  At the request of my buddy Brian Watson, I had included the common name below the scientific name.  Otherwise, none of the other nine hits on the first page my google search for “Appalachian springsnail” were relevant [4].

[4] By contrast, my exploratory search for “Fontigens bottimeri” returned much more relevant information, including my species page on the FWGNA site.  In fact, from my search on Fontigens bottimeri I found the relevant US FWS species page, at which F. bottimeri is called the “Potomac Springsnail [5].”

[5] Whose ridiculous idea was it [6] to conjure out of thin air an elaborate parallel taxonomy of “common names” for obscure little creatures that legitimately have no common name?  When I was in fifth grade, my teacher explained that the binomial system of nomenclature was proposed by Linnaeus in 1753 to solve the chaos of multiple common names for the same organism.  Now it is happening again!  We have two “common names” for the same tiny little black speck-snail that never had a common name to begin with.

[6] Turgeon, D.D., J.F. Quinn, A.E. Bogan, E.V. Coan, F.G. Hochberg, W.G. Lyons, P.M. Mikkelson, R.J. Neves, C.F.E. Roper, G. Rosenberg, B. Roth, A. Scheltema, F.G. Thompson, M. Vecchione, and G.D. Williams (1998) Common and scientific names of aquatic invertebrates from the United States and Canada: Mollusks (second edition), American Fisheries Society Special Publication 26, Bethesda, Maryland, 526 pp.

[7] A deserted warehouse on the edge of town, seriously?  Staffed with henchmen, wearing black turtleneck sweaters, perhaps?

[8] I followed up with Matt on Tuesday morning 4/28.  He replied that “Because the State, and specifically the Secretary of DNR, is party to an ongoing lawsuit, I referred your inquiry to our Public Relations Manager, Gregg Bortz.”  I have yet to hear from Mr. Bortz.

[9] To be complete, F. nickliniana populations in the East and F. aldrichi in Missouri can extend some significant distance downstream.  But F. bottimeri populations, in my limited experience, are restricted to the springhead and immediate spring run.

[10] See Maddi’s April 27 article for a nice photo of Semple Run tumbling under Celeste Road at Site (F).

[11] I did apologize, sincerely and profusely.  Okay, it was 8:30 AM, still early, I suppose.  I honestly thought that all the racket I made on her front porch would have brought her to the door, but no.  I did not get her name.