Anyone who knows Craig knows is a die-hard ally. He’s a kind, thoughtful, encouraging and inspiring mentor. Mess with his anyone in his Deep Sea crew, he is there. Trolls, science arch nemeses, the unusually grumpy, he’s got your back. But Craig’s no fool and always brings the appropriate gear: Crysomallon squamiferum. Because no one is gonna mess with a giant man and his Samurai Scaly Foot Snail Hat. NO ONE.

As already noted by Holly, Craig is pretty snazzy dresser. But what would make this man even more suave? Wearing a $20,000 Cypraea (Zoila) mariella, Mariella’s Cowry, jauntily on his head with a matching lapel pin. Take that Madeline Albright’s brooches.

Let’s just ignore the fact that he’s actually holding a bivalve here and wearing a brachiopod. But isn’t it uncanny how Craig’s head is the exact shape of the brachiopod? The man’s even got a shell shaped brain casing! Small wonder he’s got shell on the brain.

When Craig sciences, he sciences hard. Whether it be sizing ocean giants, exploring energy pathways in the ocean or excavating wood falls, his science is always innovative, fun and interesting. It’s hard work, so here’s a hairy vent snail, Alviniconcha hessleri, to keep that noggin full of amazing ideas warm.

Craig McClain by land, Cone Snail McClain by Sea. He uses state-of-the-art mind control science communication techniques to share awesome science, make you laugh, and make this ROV collect samples for him. Well maybe not the last one, but it would be cool if he did.

And last but not least, in solidarity with one of his favorite denizens of the deep, the carrier snail, we bling his head with shells from his own wood fall experiment. Because he should.

The post A graphical biographical tale of Dr. M first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Are you old enough to remember the show MTV Cribs, where a camera crew invades the home of a filthy-rich celebrity and takes annoyingly jumpy quick-shots of how awesomely decked-out and unnecessarily opulent their ‘crib’ is? Think about that approach, but with a Malacology Monday twist. Firing up a band-saw and with the warnings of my old school shop teacher “you’re gonna cut your thumb off” echoing in my head, our team will show you inside the ‘cribs’ of Malacology’s most interesting species.

High-Rise House
First up, the aptly-named Screw Turritella (Turritella terebra: Turritellidae) with a tall, twisting spire. For gastropods, the shell is a home that offers protection to withdraw into when needed, and as the muscled-mass of the snail grows, so too must the shell. The opening – or aperture – of the shell is the front-door, and new shell material is excreted by the fleshy mantle around the edge of this opening. As the door gets bigger, the shell wraps around itself as a twisted, ever-widening tube. What you see in the cross section is a ‘crib’ that starts off tiny when the snail is just a wee one, and gets larger with age. While not ostentatious enough to make it on MTV, it’s still a cozy and versatile home.

Cute as a Button
A peek inside the Commercial Topshell (Tectus niloticus, Trochidae) shows a low, tightly-twisting whorl, making the whole shell as a compact stout cone. The thick internal walls also provide strong structural support. Such a shape offers good architectural resistance from strong waves in shallow shores, and from shell-crunching fishes & crabs. From larger specimens, round shell disks are drilled to make buttons, hence the name Commercial Topshell, not that it is especially good at banking or international commerce. Since only a few buttons can be drilled from each shell, this species is heavily collected in the Indo-Pacific region where it lives, and since its meat is delicious, it has been fished-out in much of its range. Several countries are developing captive-breeding facilities to raise them commercially, and other programs employ captive hatcheries that release the young back in the wild to supplement the natural population. In many areas though, the main way to promote the population of the Commercial Topshell is to kill off their wild predators, like porcupine fishes, wrasse, bat rays, and crabs. Not such an ecologically sound approach especially since a single darned coconut can make more buttons than a dozen shells.

Home Security
Next we burst into the home of the Strawberry Conch (Strombus luhuanus: Strombidae), one of the smallest but most abundant conch species in the Indo-Pacific. Here we see the shell growing tightly around most of the body, leaving very little of the spire exposed. The aperture of the shell is very long and narrow, but since the resident snail has no internal hard parts, it can flatten its foot, head, and mantle to squeeze through that skinny opening. Such a thin front door is an adaptation against large predatory crabs, nature’s home-invasion robbers. In shells with a larger openings, crabs don’t politely knock, but hold the shell tight with one claw, and with the other, they jab it into the aperture and break the opening away. As the snail withdraws deeper into the shell, the crab just keeps turning and breaking the whorl of the shell until it reaches its prey. With the Strawberry Conch, their security system consists of this narrow opening that prevents a crab from inserting its claw in the first place, and the thickened lip around this opening provides extra strength to prevent the initial breakage of the aperture, keeping the snail safe inside

House of a Hundred Rooms
In this, our last visit through the dwellings of mollusks, we visit the palatial estate of the Chambered Nautilus (Nautilus pompilus; Nautilidae), with a grand array of ever diminishing luminous pearlescent back-rooms. As we saw during our tour through the rather Spartan dwellings of gastropods, the living chamber for the snail is a continuous tube that spirals around an axis, increasing in length and diameter as the animal grows. While the Chambered Nautilus develops in a somewhat similar way, the living chamber holds the mass of the tentacled landlord, but as the shell grows, the previous back-end of the living chamber is walled-off with a shiny layer of nacre. These rooms are connected by a spiral tube, the siphuncle (use that term in your next Scrabble match) that balances fluids, salts, and gasses, ultimately making each empty room an internal flotation device. Gastropods slowly drag their home along the sea floor like low-class campers, but the Chambered Nautilus uses blasts of water from its siphon to push the shell through the open water like a sporty, speedy, jet-powered blimp. In deeper water, the wall between each chamber strengthens the shell, preventing a disastrous implosion. Chambered Nautilus, I like your style.

The post Malacology Monthly: Inside-Out first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Galindo LA, Puillandre N, Strong EE, Bouchet P (2014) Using microwaves to prepare gastropods for DNA barcoding. Molecular Ecology Resources, 14(4): 700-705.

This paper is so simple, yet so epic in so many ways:

We have experimented with a method traditionally used to clean shells that involves placing the living gastropods in a microwave (MW) oven; the electromagnetic radiation very quickly heats both the animal and the water trapped inside the shell, resulting in separation of the muscles that anchor the animal to the shell. Done properly, the body can be removed intact from the shell and the shell voucher is preserved undamaged.

To reiterate: these researchers put snails in the microwave and got a paper out of it. Now of course, this is actually a brilliant method – the scientists stumbled across this quick fix because they need to preserve BOTH the shell and DNA from their specimens. With such thick shells, preservatives can’t get into the tissue very easily, and other methods (boiling the snails alive! or using chemical relaxants to pull out the muscle) are time consuming, sloooowwwwww, and downright dangerous:

To some extent, [these methods] can also represent a hazard (electrical drill and boiling water) on an unstable research vessel at sea.

Microwaves can zap lots of animals quickly and keep all their DNA intact!

This paper also wins for the most unnecessary use of acronyms, shortening the terms for microwaves (MW) and microwave ovens (MWO). So in everyday life I guess we can now further reduce MWs to a hand signal, and just say that we’re going to heat up our coffee in the “Muah”.

The post Putting snails in the microwave…for science! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Bio Logik is the deeper understanding of Biology and Ecology that is achieved when science, hip hop, and videos merge. This collaboration emphasizes the production of scientifically accurate music videos that 1) create a more personal connection between students and science and 2) make science accessible to a broader audience. The Bio Logik crew is represented by SDSU professor (Dr. Jeremy Long), high school teacher (John Ashley), two hip hop artists (Parker Edison and Generik), a film production team (Rowlbertos), myself and other SDSU graduate students.

Over the past couple of months, students from Mar Vista High School have been working diligently on their science music videos and now without further ado…

I think we have created little monsters. Mission accomplished.

For more amazing science videos, check out: Bio Logik

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