Volunteers and scientists working the limestone cliffs of northern Montenegro have found two new snail species, and one of them lives in a canyon that the country’s state power company wants to dam. “During dry weather, specimens were found in crevices in the rocks and hidden under mosses and at plant roots,” the team writes, and “empty shells were sieved from debris underneath vertical limestone rocks.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pair, Cochlostoma dobrido and Cochlostoma komarnica, have pale yellowish-gray shells about a quarter of an inch tall, between 5.12 and 7.10 millimeters in the specimens the team measured, and neither has an English name yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The work was led by Menno Schilthuizen of Taxon Expeditions, Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Leiden University in the Netherlands, and his 22 co-authors range from the Italian Cochlostoma specialist Enrico Zallot to a Dutch musician who signed up for a field trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I was amazed that it is still possible to discover new animal species in Europe,” said Janine Buisman, the musician from the Netherlands who joined one of the expeditions and ended up as a co-author of the paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the paper, “the work was carried out by mixed teams of local and international laypeople and taxonomists as part of a ‘taxon expedition,'” in which “‘taxonomy tourists’ are guided by biodiversity experts through the entire process of species discovery and description.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Between June 2018 and July 2025, those teams sampled the adjoining Komarnica Canyon and Durmitor National Park, together with the non-profit Taxon Foundation and the Montenegrin Ecologists Society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back at camp, “adult individuals were relaxed overnight in water without air bubbles and then transferred into 70% ethanol,” and for the shell measurements “a piece of graph paper was photographed along with the shell for scale.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Names were settled by a vote at camp. Dobri Do, the high plain between the peaks of Durmitor, got its snail “on the final night of the 2023 Taxon Expedition to Durmitor National Park,” and the other species is named for what the Pensoft release calls the “stunning but unprotected Komarnica Canyon.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both snails graze algae and lichens on limestone. According to the press release from the journal’s publisher, Pensoft<\/a>, “unlike most land snails, they do not carry their eyes on the end of eye-stalks, but on the sides of their head. And their shells come with a circular disk stuck to the animal’s tail that can close off the shell like a door.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The genus, the authors write, “is a common, well-known and widespread component of the malacofauna of limestone rocks throughout the countries surrounding the Mediterranean,” and recent work “has revealed that the uniform shell morphology hides surprisingly rich and deep divergences.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It is actually quite surprising that so many different species exist in this small area without this translating into clearly visible external differences,” says the release from Leiden University and Naturalis, quoting the lead of the wider Cochlostoma project. “The species differ mainly in their internal reproductive organs and DNA, and much less in their appearance than one might expect.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two snails belong to the subgenus Turritus, which “consists of at least 37, partly cryptic, species distributed throughout the Italian and Balkan peninsulas.” A 2024 review had already spotted them as two unnamed high-elevation forms, ‘NFS142’ and ‘NFS143’, but “because of insufficient materials,” its authors “refrained from formally describing them until further material became available.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the genetics, the team took tissue samples of about 1 cubic millimeter by removing the top two or three whorls of the shell with the soft body inside, and read two short mitochondrial genes either in Leiden or on a MinION nanopore sequencer in a portable field lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two new species proved “quite distant (ca. 8%) from each other.” Telling them from a third local species by shell is another matter: “Conchologically, however, the separation from the latter is difficult, which is why we relied on DNA sequence data for confirming the identity of any specimen found in the study area.” DNA has been redrawing much bigger animals too, as in a study that split the green anaconda in two<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n C. dobrido “was found in high densities on limestone cliffs between 1680 and 2080 m elevation,” or 5,512 to 6,824 feet, and so far it has been confirmed at just three sites on Dobri Do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It “might be endemic to the Dobri Do highland plain and may be adapted to highland environmental conditions,” the authors write. “This means its populations may suffer if climate change continues to shift montane environmental zones upward.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n C. komarnica “appears to be endemic to the Durmitor National Park and the adjacent Komarnica Canyon and probably also occurs in the narrow area in between,” and it has been recorded from 2,395 to 5,692 feet (730 to 1,735 meters).<\/p>\n\n\n\n “While the populations at higher elevations are within the Durmitor National Park, those at lower elevation occur inside the continuity habitats of the Komarnica Canyon, which is threatened by a planned hydropower dam,” the paper says. “Should this project be realised, the type locality will flood and this population will perish.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The type locality is the site where the specimen that defines a species was collected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The project is a 172-megawatt plant planned by the state utility EPCG, with a 561-foot (171-meter) concrete arch dam holding back a reservoir about 10.9 miles (17.6 kilometers) long, according to the project profile kept by CEE Bankwatch Network<\/a>. It would sit about 28 miles (45 kilometers) upstream of the Piva plant, whose reservoir, Lake Piva, dropped about 98 feet in a drought<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It is all the more worrying that the Komarnica Canyon is targeted to be flooded by a hydropower dam and reservoir. This will destroy this wild river canyon and all the biodiversity in it, including many species still unknown to science,” said Jovana \u0110oki\u0107, a biologist with the Montenegrin Ecologists Society and one of the study’s authors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Hydropower is neither green nor sustainable energy when it destroys a unique ecosystem like this,” \u0110oki\u0107 said. Her group wants the canyon added to the Durmitor UNESCO World Heritage site, and the paper backs that, arguing that its “inclusion in the Durmitor UNESCO World Heritage Site should be persistently advocated.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In May 2025, more than 200 scientists, legal experts and ecologists, along with over 20 Montenegrin NGOs, asked the government in an open letter to stop the project, the German conservation group EuroNatur reported<\/a>, after a revision of the project’s environmental impact assessment that had dragged on for 855 days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We are awaiting the final decision from the EPA and demanding accountability from all responsible parties,” said Andrijana Mi\u0107anovi\u0107, general secretary of the Montenegrin Ecologists Society and another co-author of the snail paper. “Approving this project would not only destroy a national treasure, but also further erode public trust in environmental decision-making.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “As Montenegro continues its EU accession path, upholding environmental law, ensuring transparent processes, and protecting natural heritage must remain non-negotiable,” said Amelie Huber, freshwater project manager at EuroNatur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Independent assessments cited by EuroNatur put the cost at \u20ac343 million for a plant that would cover less than 2 percent of the country’s energy needs. Putting names on small animals can take years, as it did with an Australian stick insect that people had photographed for years before it got its own scientific name<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The authors are careful about their own maps. “Still, the challenges in identifying individuals, combined with the fact that two species might occur in mixed syntopic populations, suggest that reliable distribution maps for each of the species will need to await further research. It is, therefore, also possible that more new species may turn up.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n They also note that the genetic split rests on “two partial mtDNA loci,” and that in anatomy the two are “quite similar,” with “much of the difference” between them possibly “due to individual, not species-level variability,” although the two species can still be told apart by combining shell, anatomy and DNA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The area in which Durmitor Mountain and Komarnica Canyon are located is a geologically and ecologically complex region with many canyons, plains, gorges and mountains and many microhabitats across a wide elevational range,” they write. “Consequently, local endemism in these snails may be even more widespread.”<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe DNA told them apart<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Tiny ranges on high cliffs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The canyon could go under water<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Still waiting on a decision<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What the paper leaves open<\/h2>\n\n\n\n