Dutch and Malaysian biologists announced on Monday the new findings, and full details about the tiniest snail species, including 47 other new species, are available in the open journal Zookeys.
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The snails on the island live in areas that are difficult to migrate out of, if at all, and like others of their kind, they move at a glacial pace, thus making it harder for them to migrate.
However, they knew where to look, they said; snails prefer to inhabit the limestone hills of Borneo, probably because they create their shells out of calcium carbonate, the major material in limestone. “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”.
Photo used with permission from Professor Dr. Menno Schilthuizen, Naturalis Biodiversity Center.
Then, they scoop out the floating shells and sort them under a microscope. Just a few liters of this soil can carry thousands of shells. The researchers said that it is not clear about what Acmella nana eats as they have not seen them alive in the wild.
The new tiny record holder lives in at least three places in Malaysian Borneo.
But the newly named second-smallest-snail only got to hold its title for a short while, as researchers detailed Angustopila in a study published earlier this year.
Specimens of A. nana were found in Borneo, an island in Southeast Asia shared by Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. But in other cases, the snails have eluded human capture.
In the rainforests of Borneo, the smallest land snail known to science ekes out a secret existence in limestone cracks. This is why these snails can provide first-hand data on how endemic species emerge.
Many of these limestone hills are being quarried for cement, and Schilthuizen and his colleagues have already documented native snail species that have gone extinct after their entire habitats were destroyed. For instance, a forest fire at Loloposon Cave where Diplommatina tylocheilos was recently found could push the species on the verge of extinction. Those species play a huge role in the ecosystems by feeding on decaying and dead matter. Researchers have uncovered a minute shell with an average diameter of.
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