The 15th meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Malacologists took place yesterday at the Delaware Museum of Natural History (DMNH) in Wilmington, Delaware. I counted 35 names on the sign-up sheet, 12 of whom gave talks. Here are the speakers in the order they spoke and the not-more-than-two-sentence summaries of their talks.
Paula Mikkelsen talked about the paleontologist Floyd Hodson who, while working for an oil company in 1931, described an Oligocene fossil from Trinidad as a rudist (rudists were fossil bivalves that went extinct in the late Cretaceous). Hodson's fossil turned out to be a hipponicid gastropod and his mistake ended his career.
Adam J. Baldinger presented an update on the recent renovations in the Department of Malacology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Harvard University) and the upcoming relocation of the dry collections. He also discussed the problems encountered during digitization of old collection records
Charlie Sturm summarized his ongoing project to determine if the bivalves Gloripallium pallium and G. speciosum are indeed 2 separate species.
Robert Robertson discussed the protoconch size bimodality sometimes observed in the shells of the gastropods in the Architectonicidae.
Makiri Sei gave an update of her ongoing project with Gary Rosenberg on the phylogeny of the Pleurodontidae in relation to that of the Hygromiidae.
Ilya Tëmkin talked about an old wax model of the anatomy of the bivalve Pinna that he encountered in the storage of the Paris Museum. The model turned out to be a creation of Giuseppe Saverio Poli (1746-1826), the Italian polymath who also studied mollusks.
Francisco Borrero discussed a project he is doing with Luz A. Velasco about a bivalve found along the coasts of Colombia that appears to be an Electroma species introduced from the Indo-Pacific.
Aydin Örstan presented preliminary results from the field test on the colonization and hybridization of 2 species of Albinaria in Turkey he and Tim Pearce have been conducting.
Hassan Moustahfid discussed various internet databases on cephalopods and how to transfer data between them.
Liz Shea talked about how she and collaborators Alex Ziegler, Cornelius Faber and Tim Shank used magnetic resonance imaging to identify a baby deep-sea cirrate octopus based on the morphology of its internal shell and other characteristics.
Megan Paustian discussed the reproductive anatomies and external morphologies of the species in the slug genus Pallifera.
Tim Pearce presented preliminary results of his ongoing project in collaboration with Timothy J. Dolan on the land snails of riverine wetlands in Pennsylvania. A few species seem to be more common in wetlands than they are elsewhere.
Once again I will take this opportunity to thank to Liz Shea, the curator of mollusks at the DMNH and Leslie Skibinski, the collection manager, for organizing this wonderful meeting. I am already looking forward to next year's gathering.
The bootleg transactions of the 14th MAM meeting are here
