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.

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

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

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

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

Mollusks: More Than A Shell

Don't miss the new episode of Changing Seas! Seashells, with their beautiful shapes and colors, have inspired humans since the dawn of time. Equally fascinating are the mollusks that make them, and their unique place in the web of life. Researchers and citizen scientists continue to make new discoveries, while a cutting-edge digital project makes vast research collections easily accessible online. In case you missed the premiere of the first episode of the fifteenth series of Changing Seas on WP

Shell of the Week: The Little White Trivia

Trivia candidula is a marine gastropod of the family Triviidae, the false cowries, or trivias. It reaches about 8 mm (about 0.32 inch), and has a pure white color and a typical shell sculpture of strong ribs that surround the entire shell. The spaces between the ribs are smooth. Generally speaking, trivias feed on sea squirts and colonial ascidians, but the exact feeding habits of the Little White Trivia are unknown. The species has a very broad distribution in the Atlantic Ocean: it is found in