Mission under way to save ‘world’s most beautiful’ snails

Researchers have started a mission to save what some of what they see as the most beautiful snails in the world and at the same time unlocking their biological secrets.

The enemies disappeared from the indigenous forest habitats in Eastern Cuba have the snails, vivid, colorful and exaggerated patterned shells.

Unfortunately, these bullets are desirable for collectors, and protection experts say that shell trade pushes snails to disappear.

Biologists in Cuba and the University of Nottingham in the UK came together to save six known polymita species.

Polymita Sulphurosa, which is the most dangerous of these, with blue flame patterns and bright orange and yellow bands around its coils.

However, all polymita species are strikingly bright and colorful, which is an evolutionary mystery in itself.

“One of the reasons I am interested in snails is that they are very beautiful,” he said.

Irony said that this is the reason why the snails are so threatened.

“The beauties attract people who collect and trade bullets. So what makes them different and interesting to me as a scientist is unfortunately what endangers them.”

While searching with Prof Davison, we found a few platforms where the UK -based vendors offer Polymita bullets for sales. A seven -shell collection was declared on a site for £ 160.

“We know that they are really dangerous for some of these species. [if] Someone gathers them in Cuba and excuses them to cause some species to run out of lineage. “

The shells are purchased and sold as decorative objects, but each empty shell was an animal that once lived.

Although there are international rules to protect polymita snails, it is difficult to force them. In accordance with the international trade contract in extinct species – it is illegal to remove snails or shells from Cuba without permission. However, it is legal to sell shells elsewhere.

Prof Davison says, “You can easily imagine where people who collect shells will turn a population into local destruction,” Prof Davison says, “

To prevent this, Prof Davison works closely with Prof Bernardo Reyes-Tur in Universidad de Oriente in Santiago de Cuba, a protection biologist.

The aim of this international project is to better understand and provide information to protect how snails develop.

Perhaps the most challenging of Prof Reyes-Tur’s effort is perhaps the most challenging: in a warm climate, and the polymita snails in a warm climate to their own home for captive reproduction.

“They’re not raised yet, but they’re going well,” he said.

“Nevertheless – we always have dimming.”

Meanwhile, genetic research is being carried out in well -equipped laboratories at the University of Nottingham.

Here, Prof Davison and his team can keep small snail tissue samples in cryogenic freezers to protect them. They can use this material to read the genome of animals – biological coded instructions that make each snail.

The team aims to use this information to verify how many species it is, how they are related to each other, and which part of the genetic codes give them extraordinary, unique color patterns.

Hope is that they can reveal these biological secrets before these colored creatures are purchased and sold to extinction.

“Eastern Cuba is the only place in the world with these snails.”

“The expertise is here – the place where these snails know, love and understand them, live and work.

He continued: “We hope that we can use genetic information that we can bring to contribute to protection.”