Monday, September 21, 2009

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 12th meeting in La Paz, during June 2011 (with Esteban F. Felix Pico as President) jointly with the 44th 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.



Friday, September 11, 2009

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