Posted on 05/07/2025 6:41:49 AM PDT by Red Badger
A snail with a Picasso-like shell is among 46 dazzling new species recently identified in Southeast Asia. Their discovery highlights both nature’s hidden artistry and the urgent threat of habitat destruction. Credit: Artistic enhancement of photos by Gojšina et al. A tiny snail with a cubist-style shell, named after Picasso, sheds light on undiscovered biodiversity and growing habitat loss in Southeast Asia.
They say beauty is everywhere, if we have eyes to see. For one team of scientists, it revealed itself in a tiny, 3-millimeter snail.
While surveying snail biodiversity in Southeast Asia, an international team of malacologists, scientists who study mollusks, came across a previously unknown species that stood out for its strikingly unusual shape. The research team was led by Serbian PhD student Vukašin Gojšina and his Hungarian advisor, Barna Páll-Gergely.
The newly discovered snail was so visually distinctive that the researchers named it Anauchen picasso, in honor of the renowned cubist painter Pablo Picasso. Unlike typical snails with smoothly coiled shells, Anauchen picasso features sharply angular, rectangular whorls. According to the team, its shell resembles a “cubist interpretation” of more conventionally shaped snails.
The research team just published a 300-page article including the descriptions of 46 new species of microsnails from Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Anauchen picasso. Credit: Gojšina et al.
Tiny Shells, Big Surprises
“Although the shell sizes of these snails are less than 5 mm, they are real beauties! Their shells exhibit extraordinarily complexity,” they say. “For example, the aperture (the ‘opening’ of the shell) is armed with numerous tooth-like barriers, which are most probably useful against predators. Furthermore, several of the new species have an aperture that turns upwards or downwards, which means that some species carry their shells upside-down.”
These apertural barriers and the orientation of the last whorl on the shell were among the primary characters that helped the researchers tell different snails apart.
While many of these new species were collected recently, several, unknown to science until now, were found in the collection of the Florida Museum of Natural History, collected all the way in the 1980’s. It is likely (and in some cases, certain) that the locations where these snails were found have already been destroyed by deforestation and limestone quarrying, which are the major threats to locally endemic land snails in Southeast Asia.
Reference:
“A new start? Revision of the genera Anauchen, Bensonella, Gyliotrachela and Hypselostoma (Gastropoda, Eupulmonata, Hypselostomatidae) of Southeast Asia with description of 46 new species”
by Vukašin Gojšina, András Hunyadi, Chirasak Sutcharit, Piyoros Tongkerd, Kurt Auffenberg, Jozef Grego, Jaap J. Vermeulen, Alexander Reischütz and Barna Páll-Gergely, 23 April 2025, ZooKeys.
DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.1235.145281
Too symmetrical for Picasso.
More like MC Escher, in color.
More Dali than Picasso
Escher would be all lines and angles.
Not a new species. A newly discovered species. Despite evolutionary newspeak there have not been any species using the traditional definition of such.
Yes, definitely not Picasso. Maybe Dürer or da Vinci.
Very nice photos showing a few natural formations of nature, although they appear quite similar to other Ramshorn freshwater snails I have seen in the past.
Those little protection spikes along the aperture opening, that, I have not seen before. I’m sure the ever nibbling fish did not appreciate the spikes at all.
He did curves too.
They got the “designed” part right, just the wrong Artist.
It's everywhere, from the tiniest subatomic particle, to the largest galaxy.
...............
My first thought was more Gaudi than Picasso.
Dürer would have some dude with a spear fighting it.
Absolutely true. But most of his stuff was trig-based hard angles.
I was wondering how they would taste with garlic and butter, but then I saw how small they are. One would need a whole lot of them.
I don’t get it.
You’ve heard of ‘Popcorn Shrimp’?....well these are ‘Popcorn Snails’!..................
“A snail crawling along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream, that’s my nightmare. A snail crawling, slithering along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving”. Col. Walter E. Kurtz, Commander, 5th Special Forces.
North Korean stomach snail.
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