Citizen scientists on guided expeditions helped name two snails from a canyon a proposed dam would drown

Two land snails, each about 6 millimetres long, have been formally described from northern Montenegro. The animals can seal their shells with a disk on the tail, and the team chose their names by a vote at camp. One of the names points to a place under threat.

Cochlostoma komarnica and C. dobrido: two small snails with a door

The snails have cone-shaped shells of roughly 6 mm, live on limestone rocks and feed on algae and lichens. Neither has an English common name yet.

Two features set them apart in the account. Their eyes sit along the sides of the head instead of at the tips of eye stalks, as in most land snails. And a circular disk attached to the tail closes the shell opening when the animal withdraws, in the way a door closes a room.

Spotting such details was not enough to recognise the animals as new. According to the Pensoft release, the identification came only after dissection and genetic analysis in a field laboratory, and the snails had not been flagged as unknown before then. The species are described in a Pensoft Publishers release carried by ScienceDaily and in a paper in Biodiversity Data Journal titled “Two new Cochlostoma species from the Durmitor and Komarnica regions of northern Montenegro (Caenogastropoda, Cochlostomatidae)”. The full study is available through its DOI, 10.3897/BDJ.14.e196955, and lists 23 authors, with Menno Schilthuizen as lead author. The discovery followed citizen scientists joining researchers on guided Taxon Expeditions there between 2018 and 2025. The animals are named Cochlostoma komarnica and Cochlostoma dobrido. Komarnica Canyon, which gave C. komarnica its name, is the target of a proposed hydropower dam and reservoir that would flood it, according to the researchers and a Montenegrin conservation group.

Taxon Expeditions: how citizen scientists ended up as co-discoverers

The snails turned up during trips organised by Taxon Expeditions, an initiative that lets the public take part in scientific fieldwork. From 2018 to 2025 the trips ran through a partnership between Taxon Expeditions, the non-profit Taxon Foundation and local collaborators from the Montenegrin Ecologists Society, known as MES. Teams mixed international researchers, citizen scientists, local students and conservationists, and worked in two areas: Durmitor National Park and Komarnica Canyon. The release does not say how many people took part in total.

One participant went on to appear on the paper itself. Janine Buisman, a musician from the Netherlands who joined one of the expeditions, is listed among the co-authors, and she told the release she was amazed “that it is still possible to discover new animal species in Europe.” Her inclusion shows how far the arrangement reached beyond a day out in the field, since her name now sits beside those of professional biologists in a peer-reviewed description.

The naming followed the same collective spirit. C. dobrido is named for the Dobri Do Plateau in Durmitor National Park, while C. komarnica takes its name from Komarnica Canyon, south of Durmitor, which the release calls stunning but unprotected. A vote at camp settled both choices, so the people who walked the limestone slopes had a direct say in what the animals would be called.

Komarnica Canyon and the proposed hydropower dam

The naming carries more weight because of what is planned for the canyon. Jovana Đokić, a biologist with the Montenegrin Ecologists Society and a co-author of the paper, said the region’s canyons, mountains and gorges hold extensive and poorly explored biodiversity. Against that background, she said, it is “all the more worrying” that Komarnica Canyon is targeted for flooding by a hydropower dam and reservoir, which would destroy the wild river canyon and the life in it.

Đokić was blunt about the energy argument as well. In the release she said: “Hydropower is neither green nor sustainable energy when it destroys a unique ecosystem like this.” The release gives no dam specifications, such as capacity, height, developer or timeline, so the scale of the project cannot be judged from it.

What the conservationists want is stated more clearly. MES is calling for Komarnica Canyon to be added to the UNESCO World Heritage site of Durmitor and for the hydropower plans to be abandoned, and it runs a campaign at savekomarnica.com. The existing protection is described on the IUCN World Heritage Outlook page for Durmitor National Park, which is the site the canyon would be added to.

What the survey work is meant to show

Researchers and conservation groups are now surveying the canyon’s wildlife, according to the release, to support a case for protection. A newly described species is one kind of evidence for that case, because it shows that the canyon holds animals science had not recorded before the expeditions. The release also points to a video on C. komarnica for readers who want to see the animal.

Whether the finding changes the dam’s prospects is not something the release answers. It reports a call for World Heritage status and a campaign against the plan, but no decision, regulator ruling or timetable. The open question is whether a 6 mm snail named at a camp vote can carry weight in that process before any reservoir fills.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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