Bootleg transactions of the 12th MAM meeting

The 12th meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Malacologists took place yesterday at the Delaware Museum of Natural History (DMNH) in Wilmington, Delaware. The number of attendees, only 17, was unusually low. Most malacologists had apparently not woken up from their winter slumber yet.

Here are the speakers in the order they spoke, and the not-more-than-two sentence summaries of their talks.

Paul Callomon (Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia): A new collated facsimile reprint by Richard E. Petit of George Perry's Arcana, originally published in 1811.

Tim Pearce (Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh): Attempts to correlate the activities of land snails with wheather conditions.

Adam Baldinger (Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University): The ongoing renovations in the Department of Malacology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Adam's talk was followed by a long discussion on collection arrangement, management and databasing.

Robert Robertson (Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia): Sexual dimorphism in the marine gastropod superfamily Phasianelloidea, including the genera Tricolia variabilis, Gabrielona and Phasianella.

Liz Shea (DMNH): Stomach content analyses of meso- and bathypelagic squids from western North Atlantic using CO1 DNA barcodes.

Here is a giant squid catching a fish.

Aydin Örstan (Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh): The behavior of the intertidal snail Batillaria minima during low tide.

Liz Shea (DMNH): Dissection of a giant squid she participated in last November.

In addition, Megan Paustian (University of Maryland) presented a poster about the competition (or the lack thereof) between the native and non-native slugs Philomycus carolinianus and Arion subfuscus, respectively.

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 and also for providing access to the collections. I am already looking forward to next year's meeting.


Poster readers.
The bootleg transactions of the 11th MAM meeting are here.