Finding beauty in snail shells

With support from Ocean Census funding in 2025, Yves completed a major study of material from:

• historic and modern institutional collections,
• private collections,
• shallow-water cryptic groups, and
• rare deep-water samples from regions including Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia’s EEZ, and remote Pacific islands.

This effort led to the discovery of 67 new species of auger snails. A significant advance for a family long overdue for revision.

“These discoveries represent another giant leap forward in our understanding of diversity in this fascinating family,” Yves explains. The work not only adds new species to the global registry, but also helps clarify complex species groups, resolve long-standing taxonomic uncertainties, and fill phylogenetic knowledge gaps.

Yves emphasises that the greatest remaining potential for new discoveries lies both in shallow-water cryptic species and in habitats beyond standard SCUBA depth, particularly across the Indo-Pacific. Many regions have never been thoroughly surveyed and many specimens, collected over decades, remain unsorted in museums.

Yves’ connection to the ocean began early.
“I started collecting seashells at a very young age at our Belgian coast during holidays,” he recalls.

Over time he specialised in Polyplacophora, but a conversation around the turn of the millennium changed everything. Dr Philippe Bouchet (MNHN, Paris) pointed him toward several understudied groups, including the Terebridae.

Bouchet encouraged him by saying that “virtually all species were known” and that there was “a good conchological monograph available.” Sorting them, he suggested, would be straightforward.

Yves laughs looking back:

“He couldn’t have been more wrong… Now almost three decades later, we’ve evolved from 290 valid species to over 650. And there is for sure still much more work to be done.”

That ongoing challenge has defined his career and helped reshape global understanding of auger snail diversity.

Yves is clear about the importance of the Ocean Census Species Discovery Awards in enabling high-impact taxonomic research:

“Funding from Ocean Census is of crucial aid to further continue the speed — and even accelerate the discovery rate — in the backlog of samples to sort.”

The support allowed him to examine thousands of specimens from museum and private  collections, many untouched since expeditions dating back to 1980’s. These archives hold enormous potential: rare deep-water material, poorly known lineages, and cryptic species that escaped previous classification efforts.

The funding also enables ongoing work across a broader network of institutional and private collections throughout the Indo-Pacific, building a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the family’s diversity and evolution.

In Yves’ words:

“Together, this builds toward a far more complete knowledge of species diversity in the family — and aids further insights into their phylogeny, filling long-standing knowledge gaps.”