Yellow-Bellied Snails OR MORE SNAIL MAIL!!!

Ground Control to Major Emily.

Yeah, Ground Control. Go ahead.

Uhhh, you still doing science out there, Major Emily? 

Sorta, Ground Control. It's complicated.  

...


Well here's some snail mail. New arrivals from Georgia (Fig.1)!

Figure 1. I do declare! Southern snails! We share a love of sitting on the porch drinking mint juleps.

These snails just completed an amazing transcontinental voyage (and, boy, are their arms tired! Just kidding, they don't have arms). Like other molluscan mavens of aviation described on this blog, these guys know how to travel in style - which is to say in a plastic bag, in a cooler, in a box. These are Atlantic Oyster drills from Savannah, Georgia, which are being temporarily re-homed in quarantine in Washington State(1) while they await their opportunity to teach Science amazing things about assessing risk in new situations.

You might recall the Christmas-that-Emily-Ruined Special(2), well it turns out this is the snail I was actually talking about. When I collected this species from the invasive population here in Washington (Fig. 2), those snails stopped eating and hid when they smelled chemical cues from their injured friends - they didn't even need to smell the crab that was eating those friends. They just knew that something was wrong and beat it out of there. It turns out this response is common among invasive snails here, but not seen in native snails(3).

Figure 2. The author, ca. 2009, collecting invasive Urosalpinx cinerea from Long Island, Willapa Bay, WA.

So the question becomes, are these snail species better than our local native snail species at becoming invasive because they listen to their friends when their friends are in danger? That is, do the snails back at home, in Georgia and Massachusetts, also run for their lives when they hear their friends calling for help?  Or, did the pioneer Atlantic Oyster Drills, who left their cozy homes almost 100 years ago on a railroad car headed west to an unknown destiny, in search of a land of endless undespoiled mud to roam, act basically the same as our local native snail species, and natural selection has changed the behavior of the population.  It's possible that the snails that were, quite literally, dumped from the railroad car on arrival, were all basically clueless about the predators in Washington, but some of the snails in that group did run and hide when they heard their friends calling for help when the native predators did attack - and that those snails were the only ones that survived out of the initial emigrees. They were the only ones who could reproduce, and now we have a population where that is the default response.  

Was the invasion caused by snails that listened to their scared friends, or did it result from the invasion that we now have snails that heed the warnings of other snails?

Yellow-Bellied Snails: Invasion Drivers or Survivors?

Since no one back in the early 1900's thought to do the same experiments I have done on the source populations for our invasive snails, and because the logic of time travel makes my head hurt, I'm going to do what is called substituting space for time. If we assume that there has been relatively little change in the Georgian and Massacusettsian (?) snails in the last 100 years(4), we can compare modern east coast snails (in skinny jeans, on their iPhones) to the invasive west coast population. We would predict not only that the Washington population would be more passive-aggressive, but also that they would respond similarly to the east coast snails if running away from cries of help is an invasion driver, or they would respond differently if running away was a trait that was only helpful in the new Washingtonian waters.

Ergo the snails from Georgia, now to keep my fingers crossed that the Masshole snails will make an appearance.  

Fig. 3. Snails from native and non native populations could demonstrate a variety of hypothesized responses that may or may not be related to their native culture and geographic origin.

References and Miscellany:
(1). Don't worry folks, I've got a permit and a lot of bleach and I know how to use 'em.
(2). Specifically Act II, Scene 1.
(3). More on that at some point - it's not really ready for showtime.
(4). This really only applies to the assumption that the selection for response to injured conspecifics hasn't changed, of course there have been other changes. If there have been, for instance, predators that have invaded on the east coast (cough cough, european green crab, I'm looking at you) east coast snails might also have evolved a strong response to injured conspecifics by the same mechanism of the snails that are invasive here. Actually, now that I think about it, that's one good reason to compare snails from both Massachusetts (where the Green Crab has invaded) AND Georgia (where the green crab has not invaded)

Musuem Missive #2 OR A Conchologist's Conch

Is anyone on this earth as behind the times as I am? Seriously! I get a fair amount of ribbing for the fact that I still listen to music that came out when I was in college (but seriously you guys, The Strokes are STILL relevant!). Frankly, this is not news to me. In high school I was also listening to music from the previous decade (The Cure transcends definition by a single era!).  

But I do feel like I should have at least half a clue about things in shells. 

WRONG! 

You guys all probably knew about this, but I was all like whaaaa?

Figure 1. Xenophora, the Conchologist of snails

That's right, do you need me to repeat it?

Figure 2. Xenophora pallidula. Le sigh. P.S. All these pictures are going to be from Hipstagram.
Sorry, I only had my phone and the room only had fluorescent lighting.

If your jaw hit the floor, or your hand hit your forehead - you are correct!

So this is a family of snails(1) called Xenophoridae (= "foreign carrying").  Hoarders, that's what they are. I saw them when I was with the PNWSC touring the Burke Museum's malacology collection (old news).

My fingers are literally doing the equivalent of sputtering on my keyboard - I have so many things in my head, none of them can get out effectively! Ok, ACTIVATE BULLETS!

• Why is this?
• Do individuals have different preferences? Species? Or is everything just collected randomly??
• Why is this?!
• OOOH! You could do a really cool exploration of community change over time for these habitats, just using museum and private collections of these shells and looking at what other species are attached! These are extensively collected species because they are such a curiosity. And I bet the collection records are pretty good!
• WHY is this?!

Ok, a literature search yielded basically nothing - so those of you looking for cool master's projects to do that involve warm water diving - YOU'RE WELCOME!

A little cruising around the internets yields several possibilities, and one certainty.

First, the certainty: Deep Sea News is on top of their business, and posted this a while ago (see the first paragraph).

Now the two possible explanations I've heard of so far for why this is a thing:

1. Behavioral defense
2. Mobility

Behavioral Defense

The defense idea goes like this: Snails make it harder for predators to eat them by increasing their size AND making their shells stronger without wasting energy making a lot of new shell. I buy the size argument more than the strength argument. Lots of aquatic things do this like Daphnia with their rad goth neck wear. This makes sense in many aquatic places where fish are the scariest predators because fish can typically only eat things they can fit their mouth around (gape limitation). But what about crabs? Crabs eat snails (as you are painfully aware of if you have been reading this blog), and probably won't find this shell expansion much of an obstacle(2).

Alternatively, it might be a camouflage in shallower, clearer parts of their habitat. See the video below of Xenophora conchillyophora habitat, and you decide.

To be able to say anything about this, it would be helpful to know what actually preys on this snail in real life (in addition to fascinated humans, of course). If its all fish, then this makes sense to me. Fish are also visual predators, so camouflage would also make sense. So let's just do some cool experiments you guys! Tether out some decorated and minimalist snails and lets see how they do!(3) 

Mobility

It is reported (here), and I admit I cannot personally vouch for this having not experienced it firsthand, that the habitat of these snails is very muddy. By adding easily available shell material in a spiral fashion they increase their shell circumference without having to increase body size. The shell then works like a snowshoe keeping the snail from sinking in the mud. 

I don't have a good intuitive evaluation of this notion (WHAAAT? No arm waving?! Are you feeling OK, Emily?!). OK fine: the logic seems a little shaky to me. Even most large snails are pretty good at navigating through and on top of mud using their foot as a snowshoe. It doesn't seem very necessary to spend so much energy attaching shells to use their shell as a snowshoe, because that means their foot, which is the part that they need to move around, can't get purchase. So how to they get out of a situation like that?

Either, way. SOMEONE DO SOME EXPERIMENTS ALREADY!

Also I bet you're ready for some more pictures by now!

Figure 3. The snail shell you see on the bottom is not the actual snail
featured here under all that debris, but it's just as large! Also check out the bottle cap (left).  

Figure 4. This one looks wave-swept. Actually, I wonder if you can say
anything about the flow environment looking at radial versus directional orientation of their collections?

• Also how? How do they attach it?

Again, no literature, but read this quote from a defunct geocites enthusiast website:

"Characteristically, the shell is covered with other shells, shell fragments, coral pieces, or stones that are attached or cemented with secretions from the animal. The shells are attached dead, although there is one account of a live kitten's paw being attached in an aquarium. All bivalves and bivalve pieces are attached inner side up and gastropods are usually attached with the aperture up. Once an object is selected, it is cleaned (as is the site of intended attachment), and then the object is rotated and fitted to the attachment site. This may take up to 1 1/2 hours. The piece is then held in place with the animal's foot, snout, and tentacle bases and glued into place. The Xenophora may then lay motionless for up to 10 hours, only rocking in place now and then, seemingly a check on the strength of its new attachment." (4)

10 hours?! That's a lot of time spent out of commission to glue a shell or bottlecap into place.  Must be worth it for some reason!

REFERENCES & MISCELLANY:

(1) You will recall from your pneumonic that (F)amily is above "Good Spaghetti"

(2) In fact it might make it easier for them to manipulate by giving them little claw-holds, rounder shells are harder to just out and out crush (Bourdeau 2009 Ecology).

(3) To anyone who actually wants to do this, I am an expert at tethering snails - I have tethered literally hundreds in the last two years. And I have a valid passport and drivers license, just sayin'.

(4) Zymoglyphic took this from a now-defunct (shocking) geocites enthusiast page. 

Museum Missive #1 OR Reports from the bowels of the Burke

The Burke Museum was recently gifted a 100,000 piece shell collection - the Nudelman collection named after the donor. 

One HUNDRED THOUSAND shells.  

I don't have that many of anything, let alone rare natural history artifacts.

So, who better to tour this testament to obsession with natural beauty (slashImeanawesomeshellcollection) with with than people who know a thing or two about shells?!  I had the chance to join the incredibly well-informed folks at the Pacific Northwest Shell Club.  I might know a thing or two about snail behavior and ecology, but dang, these people know their shells!  The word "encyclopedic" comes to mind. 

***Insert soapbox here about how systematists are a dying breed! and how I am a part of the problem***

Ok but even though I knew only vaguely what I was looking at, I felt like a kid in a candy store! Like I was tiptoeing through the tulips.

Here are some pictures. I will apologize in advance that they are all Hipstagram, but I only had my phone with me and the light was terrible in there:

Commence slideshow!

Figure 1. Stellaria solaris. Just ....  there is nothing. 

Figure 2. Onustus exutus (accepted name: WoRMS). 

Figure 3.  This exists.  Did you know that?
I actually forget what it is (why I will never be a good collector)

Figure 4. There were just drawers full of theses things,
 and then boxes that hadn't even been opened yet.

I think 6 years of working with ugly little mud snails really has primed me to just gawk at these things. Really, I could just sit there and sigh all day.

Figures 1, 2, and 4, are species from the family Xenophoridae - which I will feature in a coming post, because, as I've hinted at in FIgure 4, they do cool stuff with calcium.

Today's melodrama: California Sea Hare OR Official Selection for the RRRFF

On my holiday walkabout this year, I happened to end up back at Crystal Cove in Southern California on a reasonable low tide. After availing myself of the local fare (date shake!), we ran some in situ experiments in the natural experimental tanks (tide pools).  

It turns out that local grapsid crabs (Figure 1) do like to eat smashed up mussels, and sea stars (Figure 2) do frighten snails. I'm still a kid messing around with earthworms, really. I think all ecologists are.

Figure 1. Pachygrapsus crassipes. Denizen of the CA tidepool and
comparable in size to a chicken nugget.

Figure 2. Terror of west Coast tidepools (Pisaster ochraceus).
Are you noticing a theme here, yet?

Southern California coasts are pretty different from the PNW, and more diverse, so it's always fun to see new things. The tide was low enough we also saw a handful of sea hares! Sea hares are nudibranchs, which I'm used to thinking of as being quite small. I wasn't fooled into thinking they were red algae, but these were so big (6-8" long) that there was a very brief moment when I thought I was looking at a sea cucumber. 

So, like any good wannabe documentarian, I took shaky video with my phone. Today, because I evidently felt like I had done enough work, I strung together the few clips that didn't have my fingers in them. Feel free to witness the resulting oeuvre, which the critics are calling:

 ...at best, a clumsy demonstration of the flattening powers of Imovie!  ...

 ...so wobbly, I tossed my cookies!...

...more overblown gangrene than my telenovelas...  

and featuring my first efforts at "editing" sound. Sir David better look out for his job!

Surveillance Drones (AKA Google Earth Satellites) Tattle on Countries Underreporting Fish Catch

So this is cool: Google earth comes to the rescue again! But first, I'm going to blab about fisheries for a while.

You know what's weird when you actually think about it? Fish are one of the last major food sources that we rely on a hunter-gatherer (ok, a fisher) approach to supply commercial markets. Everything else, we farm, and while we are increasingly reliant on farmed fish, we still gather millions of tons/tonnes of fish protein from the oceans each year.

And you've probably heard that many fisheries (the global stock of one species) are nearing collapse (Figure 1), where their reproduction will no longer be able to keep pace with our consumption. So we gotta regulate, right? Yeah, but it's hard(1)! In addition to the fact that, on a global scale, fisheries management is a tragedy of the commons type of problem (2), in order to say how many fish we can get away with removing from the sea (right? because it's not realistic to to STOP fishing entirely), we have to know how many fish are out there.

Figure 1. Ack! Fishes disappearing! Over the past 60 years, the rate at which fisheries have been considered to have "collapsed" has increased. From Worm et al. 2008 Nature (Diamonds, collapses by year. Triangles, cumulative collapses, inset map shows fish diversity)

This sounds simple but it's not. There are literally hundreds of EXTREMELY smart people, in this country alone, trying to figure out how to figure out how many fish there are. Part of it is biology: Fish live in an incomprehensibly vast (ok, that's hyperbole, we can actually put a number on how vast) ocean that transcends national borders, and populations respond to complex global-ecological factors in natural cycles, like El Nino/ENSO, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and sweeps week. 

The other part is the human factor. One way we try to tell how many fish there are is by counting the fish we catch and eat. This relies on people telling fisheries biologists the truth - and it turns out that is not as straightforward as it sounds (sensing a theme here?). Many countries don't have the resources to accurately count how many fish they catch, but some that do...still don't accurately report how many fish they catch.

BUSTED! By Google Earth (Figure 2).

Figure 2.  Oh, don't worry, FAO people won't come to the UAE to check on our catches, just make a number up! Satellite image of a fishing weir in the Arabian Gulf. This is a passive fishing trap, that strands fish in the trap when the tide goes out, allowing humans to walk out and pick em up.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia, including Fisheries Collapse Hotshot Daniel Pauly, used Google Earth to identify a major source of missing fish reports, weirs in the Persian Gulf (read all about it). So, ok, how big a deal can some fish traps be? Researchers estimated that the 1900 traps they saw from space caught 31,433 tonnes per year of fish! That's six times what was reported. Yeah, that makes it pretty hard to figure out how many fish and crabs are left in the ocean.

References and Miscellany:

(1) Here is where I acknowledge that, similar to every other environmental problem we face as humans, there are those who don't believe fisheries are indeed in jeopardy. Or, to be more fair, this is a contentious topic, with some arguing that projections of collapse are overstated. While I am not a fisheries biologist, I am acquainted with the literature, and the researchers who are, and am firmly convinced that there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate that we are, indeed, at risk of overexploiting most of the resources from the ocean. Here are some resources that I have found interesting, and at least somewhat balanced:

- Kareiva (Nature Conservancy) and Ray Hillborn (U of Washington School of Aquatic and Fisheries Science) comment on "dire" language

- Daniel Pauly (UBC) and Ray Hillborn, point - counterpoint

- Boris Worm interview

- FAO (Food and Agriculture committee of the UN) position on overfishing

(2) What, primarily literature isn't entertaining enough?! That was a huge seminal paper in environmental ethics! OK Fine, Here is a talking head explaining the tragedy of the commons with cartoons.

Mollusk Muzik #8 OR BLAME IT ON MY MUCUS TRAIL

I am somewhat ashamed to say that I am officially out of touch. Send me out on an iceberg, please, save yourselves from my contaminating cluelessness! I didn't know about this parody that was clearly made for this blog. But at least, thanks to Wimp, I was familiar with the song/phenomenon it was parodying. Without further ado, I give you, in all caps:

SNAIL
"ASHELLNATION"
(2013)

Thanks to Breanna* Sipley, who kindly alerted me to this opus of internet ingenuity.

*In the original version of this post, I got Breanna's name wrong - apologies. But her name is definitely Breanna.

Oh, just some stuff that happened to cross my desk.

I'm feeling like today has the Wednesday-day-after-election-day-and-nothing-I-voted-for-won blah's.  So, I'm feeling like sharing some marine science bonbons.

You're welcome:

First, a really inspired stop motion short of deep sea life as imagined by PES. These rusty tools wish they could be anglerfish! 

Next, did you know not one but TWO oarfish (Figure 1) washed up on the beach in CA recently?  These crazy guys look like eels, but are actually bony fishes, and typically live in the deep (not unlike that can opener in the last video).  Their appearances on beaches is highly correlated with an increase earthquake anxiety in humans. But remember, people, correlation does not imply causality. People also appear to be blown away by the fact that at least one of the fish was "filled with parasites", by which I mean, carrying a heavy parasite load, which, it turns out, might not be unusual for the species anyway. Humans, it turns out, are also filled with parasites (and mutualists, etc)...

Figure 1. Sweet-a** etching of an oarfish - not a leap to say this is actually a sea serpent and scientists have been lying to us.  Image credit: Wikimedia commons

Oh but speaking of parasites, this is horrifying/entrancing. 

The starfish die-off is getting a lot ("Researchers STUMPED"!!! Zinnnggggg!) of ongoing press, and researchers are moving quickly to get it figured out. Why do we care? Sea stars are the poster-child keystone predator. It's not just that we worry about their pretty faces (which are where, exactly?) turning to goo. Being a keystone predator means they have a huge influence on community structure (who lives in the neighborhood). Often they are called keystone because preferentially eat prey species that are better competitors, facilitating greater local diversity by allowing the prey that stink at competing to coexist with the better competitor (which, remember, is getting eaten by the starfish, and you don't want to experience that first hand).

Figure 2. Ouch. This reminds me of that scary story that was told at camp or whatever, where the girl was driving home from babysitting late at night, and something about a guy with a hook for a hand being on the loose, and she gets home after some chase or near miss and gets out of the car to discover a disembodied hook embedded in the side of her car....yeah. Photo Credit: Vancouver Aquarium

OK, that's all I have the brains for now.  Probably because parasites are eating the rest of my brains.  Oh well.