A newly discovered snail is so small that five of them could fit inside a grain of sand, while another tiny species seems to decorate its shell with its own faeces
, discovered in cave sediment in northern Vietnam, has a shell just 0.48 millimetres high and a shell volume of only 0.036 cubic millimetres. This makes the species so small that you could fit about five individuals inside the average grain of sand., a land snail taxonomist at the Eötvös Loránd Research Network in Budapest, Hungary, and his colleagues gathered soil samples from caves and placed them in a bucket of water.
, after the Ancient Greek word for “dung gatherer”. Standing a mighty 0.51 mm tall, it seems to arrange tiny granules of mud – possibly its own faeces – in a pattern of radial lines on the surface of its shell.Contributions to Zoology 2022 Why it does this is unknown. “If it is camouflage, what would prey on these tiny snails?” says Páll-Gergely. “If not camouflage, then what? It was surprising to see that in face of their extremely small size, these tiny snails have complex behavioural mechanisms that evolved as a response to certain environmental factors that we know nothing about.”
The snails’ miniature size does give them advantages. “It is probable that by being small, these snails can reach food particles no other species can consume and enter very narrow rock crevices,” says Páll-Gergely. They could also avoid predation by being smaller than the things their predators normally look for, he says.likely to be the smallest land snail possible? Finding anything smaller will be increasingly difficult, says Páll-Gergely.with a diameter of between 0.34 mm and 0.
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