Cuba celebrates the election of its painted snail as “mollusk of the year 2022"

Havana, 18 Mar Cuba celebrated this Friday the choice of its colorful painted snail or polymita picta, endemic to the island, as “mollusk of the year 2022" in the competition held by several research organizations. In the online voting, Polymita Picta was the most voted out of the five final candidates, with 10,092 votes out of 16,388 total, issued from 148 countries, as explained in a statement by the Senckenberg Natural Research Society, one of the organizers. “This is beautiful news” for “our incredible Polymita”, the Cuban Presidency wrote on its Telegram channel. The victory of the Cuban painted snail will serve to allocate resources to sequence the genome of this mollusk and search for scientific applications. Carola Greve, member of the jury in this peculiar competition and laboratory manager at the LOEWE Center for Translational Genomics of Biodiversity, stressed that her study will provide “important information” about the genetic basis of the color variations of her shell. The painted snail, between two and three centimeters long, is characterized by the “colorful variations of its shell” and by its “arrow of love”, a hook for “transferring sex hormones” to other specimens of this hermaphrodite species, explains Senckenberg. Polymita picta can be found only on a narrow coastal strip of eastern Cuba and, due to the loss of its natural habitat and poaching, it is considered endangered. The other four candidates for the title “Mollusk of the year 2022" were two other species of snail and one species of mussel and one species of fang shell (scaphopod). The painted snail was proposed by Cuban researcher Bernardo Reyes, from the Department of Biology and Geography of the Universidad de Oriente, in Santiago de Cuba. CHIEF jpm/jrh (photo)