World's smallest snail: A tiny mollusk with a 0.7 mm tall home
Borneo is a goldmine for snail researchers, but the island's hundreds of species are intensely affected by environmental change.
The newly identified snail, the world's smallest on record, is tiny compared to the small font used in the journal ZooKeys where it is described.
Menno Schilthuizen | Naturalis Biodiversity Center
You had a good run,聽Angustopila dominikae.聽But, as of Monday, the title of "World's Tiniest Snail" goes to聽Acmella听苍补苍补, a mollusk whose聽0.7 millimeter existence was announced in a , an open-access biodiversity journal.
It was a close race:聽Acmella nana, whose species name is Latin for 'dwarf,'聽beat out the former record-holder, a Chinese mollusk, by a tenth of a millimeter, according to LiveScience.听
Finding a snail too small to see with the naked eye takes some elbow grease, as well as microscopes. Menno Schilthuizen, of the Netherlands' Leiden University, told LiveScience that he and his co-researchers headed to the limestone hills of Borneo, loaded up bags with as much soil as possible, and carted them back to the lab, where they found snail shells by sifting out larger chunks and submersing the rest in water. Thanks to air trapped inside, the shells will float.
The island of Borneo, which is divided between Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia, is a hot-spot for mollusks due to rich stores of limestone, whose聽calcium carbonate is also found in snail shells.
"You can sometimes get thousands or tens of thousands of shells from a few liters of soil, including these very tiny ones," Dr. Schilthuizen said. The research team wasn't disappointed: , and recategorized several more, based on their shells. The聽Acmella nana's, for instance, is described as spiral-shaped, shiny, and translucent.听
Snails may have a bad rap, or, at best, not much of one: they're small, they're sticky, and sometimes they're even invasive: Florida is currently fighting off the African giant land snail.听
But the diversity of snails in Borneo highlights their importance as a .听
Because of their famously slow speed, snails don't travel far in life, meaning that distinct species can evolve in specific, small locales.听Diplommatina听迟测濒辞肠丑别颈濒辞蝉, for example, only lives at the mouth of a particular cave on a particular mountain in Malaysia, .
That makes conservation all the more urgent for the earth's snails: even a relatively small swath of destruction could wipe out numerous species. Researchers worry that extinction is not far off for some of the limestone-loving species: their home are often torn apart by cement quarries. And a decrease in snail health also means a decrease in soil health.
Meanwhile, world's-tiniest聽Acmella nana聽should enjoy its 15 minutes of fame: it only took one month to unseat the last record-holder.