WESTERN SOCIETY OF MALACOLOGISTS ATTENDS XI MEETING OF ASOCIACIÓN NACIONAL DE MALACOLOGÍA Y CONQUILIOLOGÍA (SMMAC) IN VILLAHERMOSA, TABASCO, MÉXICO

First Vice-President (WSM), Esteban F. Félix Pico, was invited by the President of the SMMAC, Dr. Luis José Rangel Ruiz, to present a Keynote Address and Workshop at the XI Reunión de la Asociación Nacional de Malacología y Conquiliología (24 - 28 August 2009) in Villahermosa, Tabasco, México. The conference was entitled "Malacofauna Asociada a los Manglares" (“The Malacofauna of Mangrove Habitats”), and the workshop was entitled “Biotecnología para Cultivo de Bivalvos” (“Biotechnology of Bivalve Cultivation”). Others special invitees were Dr. Roberto Cipriani (from Venezuela) teaching “Curso Introducción a la Morfometría Geométrica de Moluscos” (“Introduction to the Geometric Morphology of Molluscs”) and “Técnicas para la Redacción de Artículos Científicos” (“Techniques for Scientific Publication”), and MC. Andrés Góngora Gómez (from Sinaloa) teaching “Curso Teórico de Ostricultura: Principios Básicos” (“The Theories of Oyster Cultivation: Basic Principles”). Both also presented magistral conferences.

The meeting involved over 65 participants from 4 countries and at least 12 States of México. It offered a valuable platform for discussions and knowledge exchange between professors, investigators and students from various institutions and organizations. We had representatives from 11 official institutions, with a huge range of ages, experience, background and professional expertise. The hosts of this meeting were the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, Sociedad Mexicana de Malacología A.C. (SMMAC) and the Comisión Nacional para la Biodiversidad (CONABIO), with additional support from the Secretaría de Turismo del Estado de Tabasco. The event had one day of 3 pre-conference workshops, 3 days of conferences, and a one day field trip to view the fauna and flora of local rivers, ranchlands and jungles, and the Mayan archeological ruins of La Palenque. The meeting program included 54 oral conferences and 14 posters, with exhibits of 3 mollusc collections. The sessions were in biology, biodiversity, taxonomy, ecology, archaeology, culture, fisheries – just about any field of activity that can be linked to molluscs. At the end, during the general business meeting, the members of the SMMAC voted to hold their 12^th meeting in La Paz, during June 2011 (with Esteban F. Felix Pico as President) jointly with the 44^th meeting of the WSM. It was also proposed to hold the 2013 meeting at UNAM in México City with Dra. Edna Naranjo as President.

Many of us had travelled considerable distances and made major sacrifices to join and participate in the program, with more enthusiasm than economic support, which was scarce because of the global crisis. After the meeting, members of the WSM had a nice trip throughout Tabasco, yes, Hans and Rosa.

Finally, I acknowledge and thank Dr. Luis Rangel (President), from the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, and his team of professors, students and administrators who made this an enjoyable and productive meeting.

Esteban Fernando Felix Pico

Please see: http://www.dacbiol.ujat.mx/eventos/2009/malacologia/index.html for further information and announcements of this meeting.

WSM AND SNAILS IN JAPAN

"Shells were no longer just things pleasing to the senses and hailing from lands and seas I dreamed of visiting someday, but [they] revealed a context in which organisms live and evolve."

-Gary Vermeij, Nature: An Economic History

This is why I study snails. These (sometimes) under-rated invertebrates not only constitute the second most species-rich phylum of animals on the planet, but because they carry information about their lives in their shells AND fossilize well, they are time capsules of life history as well as their environment.

I am a graduate student in Integrative Biology (http://ib.berkeley.edu) at UC Berkeley and a member of WSM (http://biology.fullerton.edu/wsm). I study a family of mostly high latitude, cold-water whelks in the family Buccinidae. One aspect of my research involves determining the relationships of buccinid whelks to each other by analyzing their genes. My methods of collection and analysis for this project include “fish market science” and molecular phylogenetics.

My most reliable collection site for collecting buccinids was not the field, but the fish market— in Japan. While studying this family of large-ish gastropods, I found out that their global diversity peaks in North Pacific around Japan and the Sea of Japan. Accessibility of these snails would be a challenge, I thought. Many of the buccinids that I wanted to study live on the continental shelf in water more than 100m deep. Research cruises throughout the 1900s have surveyed the coastal waters of the North Pacific, particularly off of the coast of Alaska and one these collections (stored in alcohol) were available at the nearby California Academy of Sciences (http://www.calacademy.org). Alas, years in un-refrigerated alcohol can cause animal tissue to degrade to the point that DNA is difficult, or in my case, impossible to extract for study. To my great fortune, abundant, deep-water Japanese buccinids are accessible from Hokkaido to Kyushu, not in museum collections, but fresh in seafood markets. Buccinid flesh, called tsubu gai in Japanese, is relatively common in seafood markets. It is prepared as sashimi (raw) or cooked in a stew. Two genera, Buccinum and Neptunea, are most often harvested and are considered the best eating.

I went to Japan during the summer of 2008 and collected more than 25 buccinid individuals from seafood markets and generous collectors. Much of my funding was provided by the NSF’s EAPSI program, which I highly recommend to masters and Ph.D. students interested in working on practically any aspect of science in countries of the Pacific Rim and East Asia. I chronicled my experiences, which were rich in snails and in culture, in a blog (http://fossil-tsubu-gai.blogspot.com) as well as in the “Field Notes” section (http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/science/fieldnotes/vendetti_0806.php) of the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) webpage. I presented my research results at the lively and student-supportive WSM meeting at Cal State, Fullerton in June 2009.

One outcome of my whelk research challenged some earlier classifications of genera in the Buccinidae— a noteworthy result in a taxonomically perplexing group, but not the most fascinating. What interested me most, and interests me in evolutionary biology in general, are the phylogenies, or family trees, that are produced from species information, in this case molecular data. Phylogenies are excellent evolutionary scaffolds on which one can build analyses of morphology, reproduction, life history strategies, and even behavior. This is one of the cornerstones of modern evolutionary biology, and is the next step in my research.

I’m looking forward to presenting the next phase of my research at the WSM meeting at San Diego State University in June 2010 (http://biology.fullerton.edu/wsm/conferences.html). By then my commute to the meeting will be a breeze, as I will be a postdoc in Pat Krug’s lab (http://instructional1.calstatela.edu/pkrug/lab) at Cal State Los Angeles.

Sugoi!

Jann Vendetti

WORKING ON MOLLUSKS IN ALASKA

I’ve been involved with WSM since 1989, getting more active in the past few years, after dropping out for a while. I work out of my home in Fairbanks, Alaska. The middle of Alaska seems a strange place for a marine invertebrate specialist to live, but Fairbanks was historically the science research center in Alaska. This relative isolation from others in the field of malacology- though not from other marine biologists-makes it important and rewarding to connect through professional memberships and annual meetings.

A self-employed zoologist, specializing in marine mollusks, I offer identification and analysis for environmental assessments, biodiversity surveys, and zooarchaeology. I have over thirty years experience identifying marine mollusks and other invertebrates from the north Pacific and Arctic.

For the past 10 years I have extended my projects to include identifying freshwater macrofauna for environmental monitoring and biodiversity surveys. It is a typical boreal/arctic adaptation to be a generalist and opportunist.

It is interdisciplinary projects those that involve collaboration, that are the most rewarding. One collaborative project has been describing the Late Pleistocene/early Holocene fossils associated with the landscape south of the Bering Glacier. I was fortunate to be invited by Anne Pasch, an emerita professor of Geology from the University of Alaska Anchorage first to help identify the fossils and fragments, then to participate in two field seasons at the Bering Glacier camp. Gail Irvine, a USGS scientist has also joined us as co-author.

Located east of Cordova, Alaska, Bering Glacier and its surroundings has been the site for extensive research. The glacier is several miles inland from the Gulf of Alaska. A large proglacial lake is situated between the glacier and the low forelands between it and the Gulf of Alaska.

The rapid retreat of the 1994-95 glacier surge margin provided unusual conditions in which invertebrate skeletons were deposited on outwash surfaces as entire valves or as fragments of delicate parts.

Our work during several field seasons resulted in an extensive collection of mollusk and other invertebrate shells from Holocene deposits adjacent to the ice margin of the Bering Glacier. Four localities provided the largest number of shells, and we chose those for analysis. We considered the preferences for depth, habitat and feeding class and found consistent differences among them.

Benthic infaunal organisms dominate one site, whereas the other three are dominated by intertidal or shallow subtidal species characteristic of mixed substrates.

What we are showing through this ancient fauna is that an irregular shoreline with a variety of substrates, depths, existed north of the current terminus of the Bering Glacier. The organisms clearly had to be transported south from points of origin to the north. Therefore, the Bering Glacier must have been in a retracted position 13,000 to 7,000 years ago and marine conditions prevailed 30 or more kilometers north of the present coastline. Our report will be included in a monograph on the Bering Glacier and its environment, which we hope will be published early next year.

Nora Foster

FOSSIL MOLLUSKS IN CALIFORNIA

Well since this blog was all my idea I guess I should go first. My name is Charles Powell and I work for the Western Earth Surfaces Team of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. My degrees are in geology, but most of my work is a hybrid between geology and biology. I use mollusks and other invertebrate fossils to solve geologic questions. Right now I’m involved in a project that is trying to make a four dimensional (length, width, depth, and time) map of the San Andreas fault between the San Francisco Bay area and the Tehachapi Range north of Los Angeles. That is, we’re trying to figure out what the San Andreas fault looked like in the past and how it evolved.

My part of this project is to look at formations of similar age on either side of the San Andreas fault to figure out how they correlate and how far the San Andreas fault has moved since they were deposited. I’ve picked the Purisima Formation on the coast near Santa Cruz and the San Joaquin Formation in the Central Valley near Kettleman City. These rock units are of similar age, but standard correlation between the two using extinct species doesn’t work well because the temperatures that were present at both places were significantly different and so their faunas were different. The Purisma Formation was deposited along a cool water, open coast, while the San Joaquin Formation was deposited in an interior shallow bay that had higher temperatures. I’m currently working on a detailed biostratigraphy of both units and will then try to track temperatures shifts – cool to warm, warm to cool – and then develop a pattern of these changes for the two sites. With luck the patterns will be similar and I’ll be able to correlate them. That’s the beginning, but it’s enough for my first blog post. Check back to see what other scientists and students of Eastern Pacific mollusks are doing, and I’ll fill you in on how my work continues and what else I’m doing.

Charles Powell

WHAT IS THE WSM?

You may wonder, "What is a malacologist?" It's someone who studies mollusks, snails, clams, squids, that sort of thing. Then you might ask, "What is the Western Society of Malacologists?" Looking at our web site at http://biology.fullerton.edu/wsm/ you will find that the WSM is a group of professionals, amateurs, and students interested in molluscan research. We just enjoy studying these incredible creatures! Our area of focus is mainly the northeastern Pacific and adjacent lands, including marine, land, fresh water, live and dead animals and their remains (shells).

As a group, we cover a wide variety of topics dealing with mollusks: the shapes, sizes and locations of some strange creatures; what they do; what they eat and who eats them. We examine the functional adaptations they have evolved for defense and survival; their colors, their spines, their poisons. We describe new species, previously unknown to science, adding to the understanding of the biodiversity of sea and land. Which are in danger of extinction, because of habitat loss, overcollecting, or global climatic changes? Also of interest (to the paleontologists) are groups of molluscs that have lived hundreds of millions of years ago---many long before dinosaurs even existed.

Some of us study archaeology, paleontology and art, looking at the relationships between humans and mollucs. Of course, all of us enjoy eating some of the more tasty ones. Squirting lime juice on a freshly-caught clam, in the shade of a palapa on the beaches of Mexico, is certainly part of our studies!

To be honest, anything we find interesting, we will study. Or we will look for something interesting that no one knows about. I hope you'll come back and see what members of our group are working on.

That's the point of this blog. Enjoy and join our search!

Hans Bertsch