The world's tiniest snail, recently discovered in Malaysian Borneo and announced Monday, is the Acmella nana, which measures just 0.027 inches high.
According to Live Science, the new snail has stolen the world record from the Chinese snail Angustopila dominikae, which was crowned with the record just a month ago.
The new snail, whose name is derived from the Latin word for "dwarf," is so tiny that it cannot be seen without a microscope.
The researchers, who published their discovery of 48 new snail species
in the journal ZooKeys on Monday, collected their specimens by the scoopful.
"When we go to a limestone hill, we just bring some strong plastic bags, and we collect a lot of soil and litter and dirt from underneath the limestone cliffs," said Menno Schilthuizen, a professor of evolution at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
"You can sometimes get thousands or tens of thousands of shells from a few liters of soil, including these very tiny ones."
The researchers are not yet certain what the Acmella nana eats to sustain itself, but similar species suggest that it might survive by foraging on thin films of bacteria and fungi that grow in limestone caves.
In their comments on the new snails, the researchers noted that many limestone hills are being quarried for cement, and threaten to wipe out entire species of the small snails. They suggest quarrying only part of the hill, and leaving some parts intact for the creatures.
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