
 
 Newly described snail Aegista diversifamilia. (Chih-Wei Huang) 
 
 After over a century of being confused for another species of snail, Aegista diversifamilia finally gets its place in the limelight. In a recent paper in ZooKeys, Taiwanese researchers named it as a new species. 
 
 While many researchers would use the opportunity to give a shout-out to their favorite celebrity, this team of scientists chose to highlight a human rights issue -- the fight for same-sex marriage legalization. 
 
 This new classification separates A. diversifamilia from A. subchinensis, a similar land snail discovered in 1884. Subchinensis was thought to exist in two populations on either side of a mountain range and a river, but the snails on the eastern side were larger in shell size and flatter in shell shape. In investigating the genes of the two populations, the researchers found that they were actually distinct species. 
 
 Co-author Yen-Chang Lee of Academia Sinica in Taipei said in a statement that he named the snail in honor of the diverse forms that a human family can take. 
 
 "When we were preparing the manuscript, it was a period when Taiwan and many other countries and states were struggling for recognition of same-sex marriage rights," Lee said. 
 
 He and his team thought it fitting to use the snail -- which is a hermaphrodite, possessing sex characteristics associated with both male and female animals -- to support the cause. 
 
 "They represent the diversity of sex orientation in the animal kingdom," he said in his statement. ||||| Scientists from the Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University and the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica described a new endemic land snail species. The new species Aegista diversifamilia was long confused for the widely distributed A. subchinensis. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys. 
 
 Aegista subchinensis was first described in 1884 and was thought to be widely distributed in Taiwan. In 2003, one of the co-authors Dr. Yen-Chang Lee noticed that there was morphological divergence between the western and eastern populations of A. subchinensis separated by the Central Mountain Range, a major biogeographic barrier in Taiwan. Dr. Lee suggested that there might be cryptic species within the one identified as A. subchinensis at the time. 
 
 To prove Dr. Lee's suggestion, Ph.D. candidate of Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University, Chih-Wei Huang and his collaborators applied three molecular markers combined with morphological analysis to estimate the divergence and relationship among the closely related snails. 
 
 "When we examined the phylogeny from each gene," Huang says, "it suggested that the eastern A. subchinensis was more closely related to A. vermis, a similar land snail species inhabited in Ishigaki Island, than the western A. subchinensis." 
 
 They confirmed that what was thought to be A. subchinensis from eastern Taiwan was in fact a new species, which they named as A. diversifamilia. The name means the diverse forms of human families. 
 
 "When we were preparing the manuscript," Dr. Lee explains, "it was a period when Taiwan and many other countries and states were struggling for the recognition of same-sex marriage rights. It reminded us that Pulmonata land snails are hermaphrodite animals, which means they have both male and female reproductive organs in single individual. They represent the diversity of sex orientation in the animal kingdom. We decided that maybe this is a good occasion to name the snail to remember the struggle for the recognition of same-sex marriage rights." 
 
 The new species is larger in shell size and flatter in shell shape than A. subchinensis. The two species are also geographically separated by the Lanyang River, which makes this the first report suggesting that the Lanyang River is a biogeographic barrier for lowland terrestrial animals. 
 
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 Original source: 
 
 Huang C-W, Lee Y-C, Lin S-M, Wu W-L (2014) Taxonomic revision of Aegista subchinensis (Möllendorff, 1884) (Stylommatophora, Bradybaenidae) and a description of a new species of Aegista from eastern Taiwan based on multilocus phylogeny and comparative morphology. ZooKeys 445: 31-55. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.445.7778 
 
 Additional Information: 
 
 Funding: Center for Information Technology Innovation and Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica.
– Scientists in Taiwan snuck in a nod to gay marriage when they named a snail that was newly identified on the island. The mollusks, which are hermaphrodites and thus possess both male and female reproductive organs, have for years been mistaken for A. subchinensis, a closely related land snail discovered in 1884. So when scientists had the opportunity to rename it recently, reports the BBC, they opted for Aegista diversifamilia—a term that means a "diversity of family types"—in a nod to "the diversity of sex orientation in the animal kingdom," one researcher said in a statement. "When we were preparing the manuscript, it was a period when Taiwan and many other countries and states were struggling for recognition of same-sex marriage rights," he added. It wasn't until scientists studied the genes of the snails found on both sides of Taiwan's Central Mountain Range that it was discovered they're not just distinct geographic populations with different features (the snails on the east side have larger, flatter shells and more closely resemble an altogether different species in Japan), but they are distinct species as well, reports the Washington Post. (Homo sapiens, meanwhile, have been roasting and feasting on snails for millennia.)