Very fittingly, a new marine snail was named this week after Jimmy Buffet’s best-known song, Margaritaville. Cayo margarita is a new species of worm snail from the Florida Keys reported by Rüdiger Bieler and collaborators that made the national news, including a nice article on CNN “Space + Science” online news. The bright lemon-yellow color of the snail’s “skin” provided the initial inspiration for the scientific name of the species. (And the genus name Cayo—low island, or key, in Spanish—honors the localities where the species were originally found.) Cayo margarita lives attached to pieces and blocks of dead corals and catches its prey using a mucus net that ensnares zooplankton. Read the original scientific report here.
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