Record-breaking tiny Chinese land snails discovered, less than 1mm in height

It’s incredibly hard to detect such small creatures, but several teeny tiny snail species were discovered in China that shatters at least one record.

“Extremes in body size of organisms not only attract attention from the public, but also incite interest regarding their adaptation to their environment”, write the researchers in a news release. The interesting thing about these snails is that they have round shape shells on them which help them to wedge into tiny cracks in rocks or float in water.

The empty shell is considered to be perhaps the World’s smallest land snail species when focusing on the largest diameter of the shell. The unique species was discovered in Guangxi province in Southern China and is 0.86 mm in height, small enough to fit 10 of them into the eye of a needle.

Pall-Gergely said the discovery of the small snails has big implications for scientists and the public.

Páll-Gergely adds that the investigation of tiny shelled land snails is crucial in the assessment of biodiversity and natural history including establishing the foundation of further studies of the evolution of dwarfism in invertebrate animals.

The scientists, from the Shinshu University in Japan and the University and Natural History Museum of Bern in Switzerland, said because of the lack of samples, the evolutionary relationships between the species and indeed how many species there are is unknown.

The team hopes the results of their find will provide the taxonomic ground work for future studies concerning the evolution of dwarfism in invertebrates, according to the Daily Record. Its scientific name fabella comes from the Latin word for “little bean”, which refers to the shell’s bean-shaped opening.

The seven new species belong to three genera Angustopila, Hypselostoma and Krobylos within the family Hypselostomatidae.

Dominikae actually comes with a close contender for second-smallest land snail, too: Angustopila subelevata, a snail described in the same paper, has a shell about.87 millimeters high on average.

Two of the authors have previously described other species of tiny land snails from China and Korea in the same journal. The smallest snail in the world is ammonicera minortalis which is a sea snail that is only 0.32mm.