Allentown Morning Call
One day, on a well-trod stretch of Florida's famed Miami Beach oceanfront, Rüdiger Bieler did something hundreds of thousands of tourists do every year: He stooped over and picked up a seashell.
The shell wasn't pretty. But it was significant. In a sort of lesson on how much of the natural world remains undiscovered, the shell turned out to be scientists' first evidence of a previously unknown species of snail.
Now Bieler and a colleague are finding dozens more new marine species as they survey 4,000 square miles (10,000 square kilometers) of ocean bottom around another tourist mecca, the Florida Keys. Many of them are snails whose adult size is less than a grain of sand.
"I've seen little kids on the beaches where I'm working holding up shells I have never gotten around to describing," said Bieler, chairman of the Field Museum's zoology department and one of a handful of world authorities on snails. "I've been astonished by how much diversity there is under our noses."
From the 582 mollusk species known in the Keys in 1995, the researchers have expanded the list to more than 1,400 species, and they are still counting.
What Bieler picked up in Miami Beach in 1997 was a worm snail shell the size of a pencil eraser head. A year later he found living specimens of the creature, still not named scientifically, in ten feet (three meters) of water not far away.
Though millions of tourists have picked up and carried home snail shells from Florida, Bieler doubts many beachcombers ever noticed a shell like the one he picked up.
"Worm snails don't usually end up in people's vacation collections," said Bieler, "because they are ugly as hell and hard to dislodge from the rocks they cement themselves to."
Their shells in fact don't much look like snails but are irregularly shaped tubes easily mistaken for a rock or barnacle.
Their lives are about as colorful as a rock's too.
"They cement their shells to a piece of rock," Bieler said, "and spend their lives there. They spread slime around them to trap particles of food floating by. To reproduce, the males send packages of sperm floating off in the current, and it bobs about for weeks before it is trapped by slime spread by female snails."
Snails Are "Not Poster Material"
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