No salt on this margarita, please.
Scientists honored the late Jimmy Buffett by naming a newly discovered species of marine snail living in the Florida Keys after one of his most iconic songs.
The tiny, key-lime-colored Coya margarita was found hiding inside the coral barrier reef along the Keys, a collection of islands long associated with the yacht rock star’s 1977 hit “Margaritaville,” according to a study published Monday in the journal PeerJ.
Biologist Rüdiger Bieler, the report’s lead author 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 of course, Jimmy Buffett’s music,” Bieler, who is curator of invertebrates at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, told CNN.
“So when we came up with a species name, we really wanted to allude to the color of the drink and the fact that it lives in the Florida Keys.”
Bieler and his team found the margarita snails while conducting scuba surveys in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.
They also discovered a close, lime-colored relative during a separate expedition in Belize.
They created a new genus, Cayo, after the Spanish word for a small, low island, then opted to name margarita for Buffet — who died of skin cancer in September — and the lime snail galbinus, which means “greenish-yellow.”
The colorful snails “are so small and so well-hidden that we’ve not encountered them before during our scuba diving surveys. We had to look very closely,” Bieler said in a statement.
The unique colors are “likely warning colors” before delivering toxic metabolites in its mucus, Beiler said — a vital defense mechanism for a species that plants itself down in a forever 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 around the snail’s body, and the animal hunts by laying out a mucus web to trap plankton and bits of detritus.”
Considering their bright coloring and tendency to attach themselves to one home forever, researchers were astounded that the Cayo had not been discovered before.
Their discovery, however, only proves that there is so much yet to be found.
“It’s another indication that right under our noses, we have undescribed species. This is in snorkeling depth in a heavily touristed area, and we’re still finding new things all around us,” said Bieler.
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