Newly Discovered Land Snail Named After Its Remarkable Diversity

Researchers from the Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University and the Biodiversity Research Center have found a new endemic land snail species that was long confused for the widely distributed A. Subchinesis.

Aegista subchinensis was first described in 1884 and was thought to be widely distributed in Taiwan. However, in 2003, study author Dr. Yen-Chang Lee noticed a morphological divergence between the western and eastern populations of the species, which showed separations via the Central Mountain Range.

To further study the issue, researchers applied three molecular markers combined with morphological analysis to estimate the divergence and relationship among the closely related snails.

"When we examined the phylogeny from each gene," Huang said, in a news release, "it suggested that the eastern A. subchinensis was more closely related to A. vermis, a similar land snail species inhabited in Ishigaki Island, than the western A. subchinensis."

They confirmed that what was thought to be A. subchinensis from eastern Taiwan was in fact a new species, which they named as A. diversifamilia. The name means the diverse forms of human families, and in this case, that the creature carries hermaphroditic traits. 

"When we were preparing the manuscript," Dr. Lee explains, "it was a period when Taiwan and many other countries and states were struggling for the recognition of same-sex marriage rights. It reminded us that Pulmonata land snails are hermaphrodite animals, which means they have both male and female reproductive organs in single individual. They represent the diversity of sex orientation in the animal kingdom. We decided that maybe this is a good occasion to name the snail to remember the struggle for the recognition of same-sex marriage rights."

The new species is larger in shell size and flatter in shell shape than A. subchinensis. The two species are also geographically separated by the Lanyang River, which makes this the first report suggesting that the Lanyang River is a biogeographic barrier for lowland terrestrial animals.

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal ZooKeys.