It’s the Year of the Snail!

It’s only March but we already have a Mollusc of the Year. The Cuban painted snail (Polymita picta) dazzled voters in a clammy beauty contest organized by the Senckenberg Nature Research Society, the LOEWE Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics, and the worldwide society for mollusc research (Unitas Malacologica).

The little guy/gal leads an interesting life. It’s 2-3 centimeters long, sporting intense color variations on the shell and wielding “an enigmatic ‘love arrow’ – a chalk arrow used to stab mating partners in order to transfer sex hormones. The snails are male and female at the same time, without being able to fertilize themselves, and reproduce during the rainy season,” according to Senckenberg.

The endangered creature can be found only along the coast in eastern Cuba. As the context winner, the vibrant beauty will now have its entire genome sequenced by the LOEWE Centre.

Runners-up included the redundantly named Telescope Snail (Telescopium telescopium), the ocean-floating Sea Butterfly (Cymbulia peronii), and the Naval Shipworm (Teredo navalis), which is not a worm but a clam (and which ate enough of Columbus’s ships to strand the explorer in Jamaica).

Photo credit: Bernardo Reyes Tur