A new endemic land snail species is named for equal marriage rights. The new species, Aegista diversifamilia has been long confused with the widely distributed A. subchinensis. Scientists from the Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University and the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica described the new snail species. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Aegista subchinensis was initially described in 1884 and was believed to be widely distributed in Taiwan. In 2003, Dr. Yen-Chang Lee, one of the co-authors, discovered a morphological divergence among the western and eastern populations of the creature separated by the Central Mountain Range, a significant biogeographic barrier in Taiwan. At the time, Dr. Lee suggested that there may be a cryptic species within the one identified as A. subchinensis.

To back up Dr. Lee’s suggestion, Chih-Wei Huang, PhD candidate of Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University, and his collaborators applied three molecular markers in conjunction with morphological analysis to estimate the divergence and relationship between the closely related snails.

Huang said in a statement, “When we examined the phylogeny from each gene, 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.”

The researchers confirmed that what was believed to be A. subchinensis from eastern Taiwan was in fact a new species, which they named A. diversifamilia. The name means diverse forms of human families.

Dr. Lee explained that when the researchers were preparing the manuscript, “…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.”