A tiny mollusc in Borneo is the new record holder for the world’s smallest known snail. It is so small that the researchers couldn’t see it in the wild without a microscope! Its shiny, translucent, white shell has an average height of 0.027 inches. The former champion – the Chinese snail Angustopila dominikae – is the world’s second-smallest snail, with an average shell height of 0.033 inches. Dutch and Malaysian researchers have named the snail Acmella nana; its species name (nana) is a reference to the Latin nanus, or “dwarf”.
But the researchers knew exactly where to hunt for unknown mollusks: Snails tend to live on Borneo’s limestone hills, likely because their shells are made of calcium carbonate, the main component of limestone, said study co-researcher Menno Schilthuizen, a professor of evolution at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
“When we go to a limestone hill, we just bring some strong plastic bags, and we collect a lot of soil and litter and dirt from underneath the limestone cliffs,” Schilthuizen told Live Science.
They sieve the contents, and dump the larger objects (including the snail shells) into a bucket of water. “We stir it around a lot so that the sand and clay sinks to the bottom, but the shells- which contain a bubble of air – float,” Schilthuizen said.
Then, they scoop out the floating shells and sort them under a microscope.
“You can sometimes get thousands or tens of thousands of shells from a few liters of soil, including these very tiny ones,” he said.
It’s unclear what Acmella nana eats, because the researchers have never seen it alive in the wild. But the researchers have observed a related snail species from Borneo, Acmella polita, foraging on thin films of bacteria and fungi that grow on wet limestone surfaces in caves.
Picture Credit : Google