A tiny snail with a cubist-style shell, named after Picasso, sheds light on undiscovered biodiversity and growing habitat loss in Southeast Asia.
They say beauty is everywhere, if we have eyes to see. For one team of scientists, it revealed itself in a tiny, 3-millimeter snail.
While surveying snail biodiversity in Southeast Asia, an international team of malacologists, scientists who study mollusks, came across a previously unknown species that stood out for its strikingly unusual shape. The research team was led by Serbian PhD student Vukašin Gojšina and his Hungarian advisor, Barna Páll-Gergely.
The newly discovered snail was so visually distinctive that the researchers named it Anauchen picasso, in honor of the renowned cubist painter Pablo Picasso. Unlike typical snails with smoothly coiled shells, Anauchen picasso features sharply angular, rectangular whorls. According to the team, its shell resembles a “cubist interpretation” of more conventionally shaped snails.
The research team just published a 300-page article including the descriptions of 46 new species of microsnails from Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Tiny Shells, Big Surprises
“Although the shell sizes of these snails are less than 5 mm, they are real beauties! Their shells exhibit extraordinarily complexity,” they say. “For example, the aperture (the ‘opening’ of the shell) is armed with numerous tooth-like barriers, which are most probably useful against predators. Furthermore, several of the new species have an aperture that turns upwards or downwards, which means that some species carry their shells upside-down.”
These apertural barriers and the orientation of the last whorl on the shell were among the primary characters that helped the researchers tell different snails apart.
While many of these new species were collected recently, several, unknown to science until now, were found in the collection of the Florida Museum of Natural History, collected all the way in the 1980’s. It is likely (and in some cases, certain) that the locations where these snails were found have already been destroyed by deforestation and limestone quarrying, which are the major threats to locally endemic land snails in Southeast Asia.
Reference: “A new start? Revision of the genera Anauchen, Bensonella, Gyliotrachela and Hypselostoma (Gastropoda, Eupulmonata, Hypselostomatidae) of Southeast Asia with description of 46 new species” by Vukašin Gojšina, András Hunyadi, Chirasak Sutcharit, Piyoros Tongkerd, Kurt Auffenberg, Jozef Grego, Jaap J. Vermeulen, Alexander Reischütz and Barna Páll-Gergely, 23 April 2025, ZooKeys.
DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.1235.145281
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