Friday, March 29

They identify the smallest land snail species in the world: it is around 0.5 mm tall and its discoverers needed brushes and a microscope


Do you have a penny on hand? If so – in addition to the first step to becoming a billionaire – you can create your own colony of Angustopila psammion, the smallest species of land snail known to date. Its discoverers have found it in the sediments of a cave located in northern Vietnam and have just published an article in the magazine Contributions to Zoology (CTOZ) in which they detail in detail its surprising measures.

The shell of Angustopila psammion does it move between 0.6 and 0.68 millimeters wide and a height of 0.46 to 0.57. In terms of volume, the smallest adult specimen they found was 0.036 mm3. For reference, the diameter of a 10 cent coin does not reach 20 mm.

“Hunting” with a microscope and a nail brush

The Angustopila psammion is so tiny that to locate it Brown Páll-Gergely, a taxonomist at the Eötvös Loránd Research Network in Budapest, Hungary, and the rest of his colleagues had to use their wits. They first collected samples of the limestone rocks in the cave, then placed them in a bucket of water, removed the floating slag with the remains of plants and shells, dried it, sifted it and magnified with the aid of a stereoscopic microscope.. “I cleaned the shells with very precise brushes that nail artists use,” explica a New Scientist.

What they found not only allowed them to catalog the Angustopila psammion. In the sediments, the researchers also located shells of gastropods that live on the surface, which has led them to conclude that the small snails probably do not reside in caves, but in the depths of the limestone cracks or on roots. With its size, the species snatches Angustopila pallgergelyi Y Acmella nana the record for smallest size among land snails.

During their investigations, the team also located another species north of Laos, the Angustopila coprologues, which stands out for the small granules of mud that cover its shell, possibly generated by its own droppings. Scientists are now wondering what use the snails can make of it. They believe it may be a camouflage system, a way to recognize each other when mating, or even a way to retain water with “mini sponges.”

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Is there a reason these species are so small? In the published article in the magazine CTOZ, the researchers explain that, “in many groups, reduction in body size may be advantageous and may become a driving force in adaptive speciation processes whereby competition for the same resource is reduced.”

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It can help them, for example, to parasitize small eggs, as occurs with certain wasps, ingest particles that they would not otherwise consume or even access inaccessible cracks with a larger dimension. “In land snails, the small size is probably due mainly to the accessibility of small spaces in the basement”, the experts ditch.

Images | Courtesy of Barna Páll-Gergely



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