The 'Margaritaville' snail: meet the new species named after a Jimmy Buffett song

Jimmy Buffett's music is synonymous with the Florida Keys. His longtime association with the archipelago off the state's southern coast led to a newly discovered, brightly colored snail being named after one of the late musician's most famous songs.

Cayo Margarita, a small, bright yellow marine snail found in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary by a group of researchers, was named after the citrusy drinks in Buffett's song Margaritaville, according to a statement by the Field Museum of Natural History.

Initially, biologist and lead author of the study Rüdiger Bieler, and his fellow researchers believed the snail to be of the same species as one found in Belize, but DNA sequencing proved them to be very different.

They're distant cousins of the shelled gastropods we see on land, leaving trails of slime.

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Cayo Margarita spends most of its life in one spot

But unlike land snails, Cayo Margarita doesn't move once the juvenile snail finds a satisfactory home.

“I find them particularly cool because they are related to regular free-living snails, but when the juveniles find a suitable spot to live, they hunker down, cement their shell to the substrate, and never move again,” Bieler said in the statement.

Its shell continues to grow as an irregular tube around the snail's body, Bieler said.

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How the small marine snails hunt, defend themselves

Cayo Margarita, also nicknamed "worm snails," hunts by laying out a mucus web to trap plankton and bits of detritus, Bieler said.

The snails have a key trait in common with other "worm snails." Their brightly colored heads poke out of their tubular shells, thought to be a warning color.

“They have some nasty metabolites in their mucus," Bieler said. "That also might help explain why they're able to have exposed heads — on the reef, everybody is out to eat you, and if you don't have any defensive mechanism, you will be overgrown by the corals and sea anemones and all the stuff around you. It seems like the mucus might help deter the neighbors from getting too close.”

Bieler says the discovery of these creatures could help cast a light on the plight of coral reefs. Cayo Margarita tend to live on dead coral and as more coral dies from the effects of rising sea temperatures, the snails could spread.

“There have been increases in global water temperatures, and some species can handle them much better than others,” Bieler said.

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Dangerous giant African snails also found in Florida

Florida is also home to huge African land snails that grow over five times the size of a garden snail and eat at least 500 different types of plants. They're capable of causing extensive damage to the environment and devastating Florida's agriculture and natural areas.

They pose health risks to humans, too. The enormous snails carry the rat lungworm parasite, known to cause a potentially fatal form of meningitis in humans.

Small crustacean named for Jimmy Buffett

Researchers who discovered the first new gnathiid isopod in Florida in nearly a century, named the tiny crustacean found in the Florida Keys gnathia jimmybuffetti, according to a recent Palm Beach Post column.