No salt on this margarita, please.
Scientists honored the late Jimmy Buffett by naming a newly discovered species of marine snail living within the Florida Keys after considered one of his most iconic songs.
The tiny, key-lime-colored Coya margarita was found hiding contained in the coral barrier reef along the Keys, a set of islands long related to the yacht rock star’s 1977 hit “Margaritaville,” in response to a study published Monday within the journal PeerJ.
Biologist Rüdiger Bieler, the report’s lead creator and self-described Parrothead, said the lemon-coloring of the mystery snail immediately reminded him of the song’s signature cocktail.
“In some ways, our team was no stranger to the regional signature drink. And in fact, Jimmy Buffett’s music,” Bieler, who’s curator of invertebrates on the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, told CNN.
“So after we got here up with a species name, we actually desired to allude to the colour of the drink and the indisputable fact that it lives within the Florida Keys.”
Bieler and his team found the margarita snails while conducting scuba surveys within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
Additionally they discovered a detailed, lime-colored relative during a separate expedition in Belize.
They created a recent genus, Cayo, after the Spanish word for a small, low island, then opted to call margarita for Buffet — who died of skin cancer in September — and the lime snail galbinus, which suggests “greenish-yellow.”
The colourful snails “are so small and so well-hidden that we’ve not encountered them before during our scuba diving surveys. We needed to look very closely,” Bieler said in a press release.
The unique colours are “likely warning colours” before delivering toxic metabolites in its mucus, Beiler said — a significant defense mechanism for a species that plants itself down in a endlessly home as a juvenile.
After finding a well-protected piece of dead coral, the Cayo “hunker down, cement their shell to the substrate, and never move again,” Bieler said.
“Their shell continues to grow as an irregular tube across the snail’s body, and the animal hunts by laying out a mucus web to trap plankton and bits of detritus.”
Considering their brilliant coloring and tendency to connect themselves to 1 home endlessly, researchers were astounded that the Cayo had not been discovered before.
Their discovery, nonetheless, only proves that there’s a lot yet to be found.
“It’s one other indication that right under our noses, we’ve got undescribed species. That is in snorkeling depth in a heavily touristed area, and we’re still finding recent things throughout us,” said Bieler.
