Mollusks

Shell of the Week: The Little-ribbed Cardiomya

The bivalve Cardiomya costellata reaches only 11 mm (0.44 inch) and, as most members of the family Cuspidariidae do, has a shell sculpture of prominent radial (from the beak to the margin) ribs and a tube-like projection on the posterior end of the shell called a rostrum. The internal surface of the valves is glossy. Cuspidariid clams are carnivores and live buried, sticking their siphons through the rostrum out of the soft-sand or mud to detect and ingest prey (small worms, crustaceans, etc.) T

Cool 3D Models of Freshwater Mussels!

During the August episode of the National Shell Museum lecture series, Smithsonian’s Curator of Bivalves Dr John Pfeiffer presented (among several advances in the study of North American freshwater mussels) “Freshwater Mussels of America.” Dr Pfeiffer plays a major role in that great project, developed in association with his “alma mater,” the University of Florida/Florida Museum (Gainesville). “Freshwater Mussels of America” displays awesome 3D models of 100 species of freshwater bivalves from

Florida United Malacologists 2024

Save the Date! The next meeting of Florida United Malacologists (FUM) will take place on Sanibel Island, Florida, on Saturday, April 13, 2024, at the Sanibel Community House, 2173 Periwinkle Way, on Sanibel. The one-day gathering brings together researchers, collectors, students, citizen scientists, and enthusiasts interested in a broad range of mollusk-related topics. Read more about previous FUM events at https://shellmuseum.org/2022-fum. Registration and more information to follow soon. W

Shell of the Week: The White Verticordia

Spinosipella agnes is a small (reaching 23.2 mm or 0.9 inch) deep-water clam that was described in 2008 by Luiz Simone and Carlo Cunha in the National Shell Museum’s own journal The Nautilus. The characteristic shell sculpture includes sharp-ribs that swirl around the surface of the shell. For that and other reasons, the species was for many years confused with the Sharp-rib Verticordia, Spinosipella acuticostata, from the eastern Atlantic Ocean. The White Verticordia can be found in in deep wa

Conserving Springsnails at the Phoenix Zoo

Aquariums and Zoos play an important role in conservation, by breeding, rearing large numbers of offspring, and releasing ("propagating" in conservation jargon) the animals back into their natural environment. Such in-house conservation efforts usually go hand-in-hand with work that aims to mitigate the cause or causes for the endangerment of the species in the first place. Freshwater mollusks are one of the most imperiled groups of animals in the United States. One of the organizations that

Eyes Communicate with Tentacles in Scallops

In 2019, I reported on the great work on the eyes of scallops done by Daniel Speiser and his team at the University of South Carolina. Among other finds, Speiser and his collaborators have shown that scallops can narrow their eye pupils upon exposure to light, and that the blue eye color of Bay Scallops and other scallops is produced by blue nanospheres that may help increase vision contrast. Scallops have a visual system of dozens of eyes distributed almost along the entire periphery of their s

The Eastern Seaboard Project – Geolocation in Progress

Geolocation is the process and technique of pinpointing the geographical location of something using digital information. Most of the National Shell Museum collection lots* have good geographical location (we know where they came from), but translating all that information into digital references is a laborious and time-consuming activity. Thanks to the Thematic Collections Network project “Mobilizing Millions of Mollusks of the Eastern Seaboard” funded by the National Science Foundation, and th

The New Octopus Garden

Social media has been abuzz with the finding of yet another deep-sea octopus nursery, this one off the coast of Costa Rica, at a depth of about 2,800 meters (about 9,200 feet). This is the third discovery of an octopus nursery in the deep ocean; in 2019 I reported in this blog about the finding of a nursery of Muusoctopus robustus*, then nicknamed “The Octopus Garden,” a gentle allusion to Ringo Starr’s song in the 1969 Beatles album Abbey Road. The original Octopus Garden was located near the D

Shell of the Week: The Barbados Miter

Probata barbadensis reaches up to 45 mm (about 1.8 inches). A marine gastropod of the miter family Mitridae, the Barbados Miter is found in relatively shallow water off the coast of east Florida, the Florida Keys, the Caribbean Region, and the western Atlantic south to eastern Brazil. The shell is attractive, with a regular pattern of spiral ridges set against a mostly smooth background. The columella, or central shell shaft, has five slanted folds (visible on the photo on right). The shell colo

Giant African Snails Strike Again!

Once again, Lissachatina fulica has been found in Florida, this time in Miramar, a city in south Broward County. This is one more episode in the saga of the introduction of Giant African Snails (GAS) in the Sunshine State. The species has been introduced to Florida and found at least four times since 1966, most recently in 2022. Most of the time these introduced snails were eradicated, at the expense of copious amounts of taxpayer-supported funds. Originally from East Africa, the species has bee