Remember the taxonomy mnemonic you learned in high school biology? It will come in handy again while trying to parse the news about the recent discovery of 46 new species (all falling under the same genus, Anauchen) of Southeast Asian microsnails, one of which—Anauchen picasso—is named after the famous Spanish artist. This newly identified species earned its art historical name thanks to the angular (rather than the more typical curved) patterns on its tiny 3mm-wide shells.
A paper published by an international team of malacologists (mollusk scientists) in the peer-reviewed scientific journal ZooKeys identified A. Picasso as being different from other similar land snails thanks to “whorls painted in a Pablo Picasso style (i.e., resembling the art style known as Cubism).”
As reported earlier this month in the biotech website Bioenginner, researchers completed field work in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, comparing their findings to decades’ worth of mollusk specimens owned by the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Picasso is not the only cultural figure to have a species named after him. Other examples include Rossoella belkisae, a sea snail named after the Cuban painter Belkis Ayón; Rissoella belkisae, Sonoma rossellinae, a beetle named after the Italian actress and filmmaker Isabelle Rossellini; and Agromyza princei, a fly named after the iconic musician Prince.
As for Picasso, the Cubist artist, he is much better known for depicting mollusks on the other end of the size spectrum from microsnails.
