Curator’s Corner

Museum, research, and collection updates from Dr. José H. Leal, plus Shell of the Week, which highlights a different species every other Friday. Most Shells of the Week are found in Southwest Florida.

Dr. José H. Leal serves as the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum & Aquarium’s Science Director and Curator. He received his Ph.D. in Marine Biology and Fisheries from the University of Miami and has served at the Museum since 1996.

Southwest Florida Shells

There are millions of mollusks living offshore along Southwest Florida’s shallow, 80-mile-wide continental shelf (the part of the continent under water). When cold winter winds from the north or northwest blow in the Gulf of Mexico, the water moves in directions that drive many mollusks (or empty shells) onto the shore. The effect is enhanced along barrier islands such as Sanibel, Captiva, Cayo Costa, and south to Fort Myers Beach, Keewaydin, Marco, Kice, and the Ten Thousand Islands. In the su

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

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

Shells, a New Book by Fabio Moretzsohn

Published posthumously, “Shells” delivers great and current information on shells and the animals that make them. The 176-page volume would have been released three years after the untimely passing of my friend and colleague Dr Fabio Moretzsohn in early 2020. Fabio was an Assistant Professor at Texas AM in Corpus Christi, Texas. There is a wealth of data in his book on intriguing aspects of the biology and ecology of mollusks, and thorough coverage of little-known information on cultural and spi

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

Shell of the Week: The Dietz Rose Corbula

Caryocorbula dietziana is a small (reaching 15 mm, or 0.6-inch) bivalve of a family notorious for their difficult and confusing taxonomy, the Corbulidae, also known as Basket Clams. Its shell has the posterior ridge typical of the family. Like in most other corbulid species, the right valve is larger than the left one, and this difference is accentuated in this species as the clam grows older, which renders a gnarly aspect to those shells. The Dietz Rose Corbula may be rose, whitish, or cream-co

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