She is colorful and special – and love arrows are her specialty. The Cuban land snail lives only on a narrow coastal strip of Cuba – and is threatened with extinction.
Frankfurt/Main – It is particularly colorful and reproduces with a “love arrow”: the Cuban land snail (Polymita picta) is the “Mollusk of the Year 2022”.
In the international public vote, the snail received the most votes, as the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung announced on Friday in Frankfurt. As a kind of reward, the genome of the species is now being decoded. So far there are only a few mollusk species whose genome has been completely deciphered.
The two to three centimeter large animals are only found along a narrow coastal strip in eastern Cuba and are threatened with extinction. Cuban land snails are known for particularly colorful variations in their shell – and for their unusual mating behavior: The snail has a kind of “love dart” made of lime, with which mating partners are pricked in order to transfer sex hormones. The snails are male and female at the same time, but cannot fertilize themselves.
The species was selected from almost 50 nominations and prevailed against other snail species, mussels and so-called scaphopods, among others. Cuban land snails feed on moss and lichen on tree bark, helping to keep trees healthy, it has been said. dpa
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