Setting new world records - a lot faster than a Snail's pace!

Apologies for my lack of blogging over the last week, I've been caught up with other projects - historical biogeography of the Felidae, anyone? For now, a short post to share a news article that caught my eye!

A paper published this week named 48 new species of snail from Borneo. Some of these are extremely rare, whilst others have been known for decades colloquially but never been formally described by academics. One snail in particular, Acmella nana, has set a new world record for the smallest land snail. It's size ranges between 0.6 and 0.79 millimeters and likely lives on a diet of bacteria and fungi growing on the walls of caves in which it lives. It snatched the title from Angustopila dominikae, a Chinese snail which was only discovered and crowned a month ago!

Other than this being fairly trivial and exciting, it serves as a reminder of the astonishing diversity of lesser studied organisms that we are only just discovering, or are yet to discover. Throughout the fossil record, conservation policy and the catalogue of species we have described lie the same biases. Vertebrates are bigger, more exciting, and most of time more relevant to us than the invertebrates  which are often neglected. Our understanding of invertebrate phylogeny, for example, is much more limited than most vertebrate groups. Mammals are one of the best studied groups in the world, we know the vast majority if not all species, we have sequenced most of their genomes and conducted hundreds of molecular phylogenetic analyses, using mitochondrial DNA to estimate divergence times and pinpoint relationships. We are a long way from this level of understanding for snails, for example, and I would like to hope that in future more work is done to better appreciate the diversity of invertebrates and other less studied organisms.

Angustopila dominikae, flaunting it's tininess. Source.