New Bright-Yellow Snail Species Found in Florida, Named after Iconic Cocktail

A new species of shiny snail discovered in the Florida Keys is named after the region’s popular cocktail.

The daisy snail’s distinctive citrus color could help protect it from predators, scientists say.

The Keys, a series of tropical islands stretching about 100 miles off the southern tip of Florida, are home to the only living barrier reef in the continental United States and many animals found nowhere else in the world.

The newly discovered Daisy snail and its lime-green cousin from Belize are the subject of a new study published in the journal PeerJ.

Scientists say sea snails are distant relatives of terrestrial gastropods that are often found leaving slimy trails in gardens.

Nicknamed ‘worm snails’, they spend most of their lives in one place.

Lead author of the study, Dr Rüdiger Bieler, said: “I find them particularly interesting because they are related to normal free-living snails, but when the juveniles find a suitable place to live, they crouch down, cement their shell to the substrate and “They never move.” again.

“Its shell continues to grow as an irregular tube around the snail’s body, and the animal hunts by spreading a web of mucus to catch plankton and bits of detritus.”

Dr. Bieler has spent the last four decades studying invertebrates that live in the western Atlantic, but these particular snails “are so small and so well hidden that we had not encountered them before during our diving research.”

He said: “We had to look very closely.”

Dr. Bieler, curator of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago, says the new species is in the same family of marine snails as the invasive ‘Spider-Man’ snail that the same team described on the Vandenberg shipwreck off the Florida Keys in 2017.

He and his colleagues, including Field Museum curator Petra Sierwald, encountered lemon-yellow snails in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and found a similar lime-colored snail in Belize.

Dr Bieler said: “Many snails are polychromatic: within the same species, you get different colors.”

‘In a single population, even a small group, one may be orange and the other may be grey.

“I think they do it to confuse the fish and not give them a clear target, and some have a warning coloration.”

He added: “At first, when I saw the lime green and the lemon yellow, I thought they were the same species.

“But when we sequenced their DNA, they were very different.”

Based on the molecular data, Dr. Bieler and his colleagues placed the snails in a new genus, Cayo, after the Spanish word for small, low island.

He explained that the yellow snail was named Margarita Cay after the citrus drinks in Jimmy Buffet’s song Margaritaville. The file snail’s name, Cayo galbinus, means “greenish yellow.”

Dr Bieler says Cayo snails have a key trait in common with another genus of worm snails, Thylacodes, for which the team described a new species from Bermuda and named it Thylacodes bermudensis.

Although they are distant relatives, all snails have brightly colored heads protruding from their tubular shells.

Dr. Bieler said, “We think this is a warning color.”

‘They have some nasty metabolites in their mucus. That might also help explain why their heads may be exposed: on the reef, everyone comes out to eat you, and if you don’t have any defensive mechanisms, the corals, sea anemones, and everything else will invade you. things around you.

“It seems like the mucus could help deter neighbors from getting too close.”

He added: “There have been increases in global water temperatures and some species can withstand them much better than others.

‘Cayo snails tend to live on pieces of dead coral and as more coral is killed, the snails could spread.

‘It’s another indication that we have undescribed species right under our noses.

“This is in a very touristy area where you can snorkel and we are still finding new things around us.”