An endemic radiation, no matter how small

Wanted: Collaborator.  Cranky old malacologist in the twilight of his dubious career seeks bright young evolutionary scientist with working laboratory and good molecular skills.  Collaboration to explore a previously unappreciated endemic radiation of hydrobioid freshwater gastropods, with potential to yield insights into the tectonic history of North America.  Apply within.

I was born a child of the American Family Road Trip.  My earliest memories of the wide world around me came from the rear-facing jump seat of a red-and-white 1959 Chevy station wagon, riding south up old US-11 toward Grandma’s house.  And vividly I remember billboards advertising the show caves – Grand Caverns, Skyline Caverns, Endless Caverns, and the crown jewel, Luray.  Hear Rocks Sing? Wonderful.

The Great Valley, with Show Caves [1]

We travelled up and down The Great Valley of Virginia.  Dad liked to hit the road before the crack of dawn, so we’d begin our day in the Shenandoah drainage, all those pretty little rivers under all those picturesque little bridges flowing north down to the Potomac.  But soon we’d crest a low rise and enter the James River drainage – the “Beautiful James,” Dad called it – running east toward Richmond.  Another 30 – 40 minutes up US-11 we’d crest another almost-imperceptible rise and enter the Roanoke Drainage, flowing SE toward North Carolina.  Then up a long grade to the New River Valley – a high plateau, actually – flowing mysteriously west toward the Ohio.  And then finally, imperceptibly, we’d enter the headwaters of the Tennessee River, flowing south.  That’s five very different river systems, each with distinctive biotic elements, flowing to all five points of the compass, draining from The Great Valley of Virginia.

And although the geology over which we traveled was complicated, the predominant bedrock has been, for quite a few years now, Paleozoic limestone.  And the hills are honeycombed with caves.  For every big show cave my family visited, there are a thousand caves that tourists cannot [2].

Indeed, my childhood friends and I were familiar with one closed-off cave at the City of Waynesboro’s Coyner Springs Park, where the Dillon family cooked out many a hot summer’s evening.  And I probably wasn’t much more than six years old when I first held in my tiny hand an even tinier hydrobioid snail of the genus Fontigens.  Those little snails covered the watercress like pepper in Coyner Springs run, the city’s water supply, where all the kids invited to everybody’s birthday party splashed barefoot through the ice-cold, crystal-clear waters.

Tom Malabad at Big Entrance Crawl Cave, Scott Co.

I couldn’t identify those bazillions of teensy little black snails, any more than I could identify any of the other familiar freshwater gastropods of my youth.  My readership of long tenure will be well-acquainted with my childhood frustrations in that regard, and how such frustrations ultimately framed my entire professional career [3].  In fact, I still couldn’t identify the population of hydrobioid gastropods grazing across the water cress at Coyner Springs Park as late as 1979, when I carried a ball jar full of them to my fellow graduate student Bob Hershler, laboring at the bench beside me at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Bob scratched that particular itch in 1990, with his admirable “Revision of the North American Freshwater Snail Genus Fontigens,” published together with legendary cave biologist John Holsinger and legendary malacologist Leslie Hubricht [4].  In addition to my childhood playmate Fontigens nickliniana, Bob and his team recognized four other species in The Great Valley, the widespread F. orolibas and three with more restricted ranges: F. bottimeri, F. morrisoni, and F. tartarea [5].  Bob listed a sixth species, Fontigens turritella, from just over the mountains in adjacent West Virginia.

Although all six of those species can be found in subterranean waters, the first four were described from above-ground springs, F. tartarea and F. turritella apparently the only obligate cave-dwellers.  And by 1989, Bob had described a seventh obligate cave-dwelling hydrobioid from The Great Valley very closely related to Fontigens [6], Holsingeria unthanksensis [7].

From Hershler [4,7]

Bob Hershler ranked among the best malacologists of our generation, and I was pleased to watch from the sidelines as he worked his way through the North American hydrobioids, not just the Fontigens of the Great Valley, but all of the hydrobioid snails all across this great wide continent 1985 - 2017.  But then, he disappeared [8].  And the snails did not.

At this point I must beg your indulgence for a flashback, to the era of the Second Great Environmental Awakening [9].  In 1979, the Commonwealth of Virginia joined a growing list of states [10] with special laws on the books directed toward cave protection.  No other state in the union, however, could boast at the time, nor can boast today, of a dedicated Karst Protection Program, staffed by biologists specifically charged with the inventory and protection of subterranean fauna associated with caves, karst and other groundwater environments, including springs.  My good buddy Wil Orndorff was hired as Karst Protection Coordinator for the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2001.

Will Orndorff

I first met Wil on the “Cave Snail Adventure” I described in the columns of this blog back in 2007 [22Aug07], leading a hunt for Holsingeria in Unthanks Cave, way down in the SW tip of the state.  Back in those days, the emphasis of Wil’s program was on karst groundwater protection, primarily funded by an EPA Clean Water Act grant.  They subsequently went through what Wil describes as “very lean years” during which time their funding was primarily from studies of the White Nose Syndrome of bats.  But the funding situation improved in 2013, at which point they began a systematic inventory of the biota of Virginia caves and karst environments in earnest.  Tom Malabad joined the full-time karst team staff in 2016.

So in November of 2018, about a year after Bob Hershler retired, I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Wil, with Tom on the CC line.  The subject line read, “Some Virginia cave and spring snail collections that need you.”

The tale of those N = 61 Virginia-collections-that-needed-me was told in my essay of [9Jan24], posted on this blog just a bit over two years ago.  The collection dates on the meticulously-documented labels they bore were almost entirely 2013 – 2018 [11].  My loyal readership might remember that, setting aside the subset containing only land snails and the subset containing only freshwater gastropods typical of above-ground habitats, I was left with a still-remarkable 20 samples of tiny hydrobioid snails on my bench.

Tom Malabad

That first batch of 20 included 11 populations of F. orolibas, 3 of F. bottimeri, 2 of F. morrisoni [12], 2 of Holsingeria, and two populations of Fontigens bearing shells unlike anything I had ever seen before.  So I got back in touch with Wil and Tom, and they sent me a second batch of 16 samples in September of 2019, and a third batch of 10 samples in February of 2020.  And in that February batch, I found what looked like a third undescribed species of Fontigens.  Oh, for Heaven’s sake.

I hate describing new species, and simply do not have the wherewithal to do so.  I have been retired for ten years now, working off plywood benches laid across milk crates in my son’s old bedroom.  It is irresponsible in this day and age to describe new species without genetic data to confirm, and that chapter in the book of my long and checkered career has long turned.

 

But by the Blessings of Divine Providence, completely independent of all the Fontigens my buddies Wil and Tom were sending me from the Great Valley of Virginia, I was also involved at that time in a separate project on Fontigens cryptica in Kentucky [13].  And my Kentucky collaborators and I had found some funding.  And I had interested our good friend Hsiu-Ping Liu out in Colorado to do the genetic work.  And we were able to piggy-back the Virginia Fontigens work on the Kentucky Fontigens funding.

 

The upshot of all this churn was that in late 2023 the team of Dillon, Malabad, Orndorff and Liu described three new cave-dwelling Fontigens from The Great Valley of Virginia: Fontigens hershleri, F. benfieldi, and F. davisi [14].  That brought the total number of teensy-little phreatic hydrobioid species under the rolling hills and gentle mountains that disappeared into the blue haze behind my dad’s 1959 Chevy Station Wagon up to 7 + 3 = 10.

From Dillon et al. 2023 [13]

One would think that would be enough, am I right?  Surely those 61 + 16 +10 = 87 samples that Wil and Tom had sent me by early 2020 would pretty much scour all the tiny little ghostly-white gastropods out of all the caves, springs and seeps in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia, yes?  And perhaps our good buddies might turn their attention to the 99.99999% of the waters of the Old Dominion a bit easier to sample?  One would be wrong.  Stay tuned.

 

Notes:

 

[1] Key to the Show Caves of The Great Valley: (A) Crystal, (B) Dixie, (C) Endless, (D) Gap, (E) Grand, (F) Luray, (G) Natural Bridge, (H) Shenandoah, (I) Skyline.

 

[2] Here’s a verbatim quote from Wil Orndorff: “Conservatively, as of today approximately 3,500 known caves in Virginia meet the international definition of a minimum length of 5 meters, with 368 of them designated as significant under the Virginia Cave Protection Act.”

 

[3] For more on the frustrations of my nerdy youth, see:

• The Clean Water Act at 40 [7Jan13]
• To Identify a Physa, 1971 [8Apr14]

[4] Hershler, R., J.R. Holsinger & L. Hubricht (1990) A revision of the North American freshwater snail genus Fontigens (Prosobranchia: Hydrobiidae). Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology 509: 1-49.

 

[5] As of 1990, Hershler et al considered F. tartarea restricted to West Virginia.  A population of the species was not discovered in a Virginia cave until 1994.

 

[6] Technically Bob assigned Holsingeria to the Lithoglyphinae (later Lithoglyphidae) on the basis of penial morphology.  But it’s a Fontigens.  Just look at it, for heaven sake, and use your biological intuition.

 

[7] Hershler, R. H. (1989) Holsingeria unthanksensis, a new genus and species of aquatic cavesnail from eastern North America. Malac. Rev. 21: 93-100.

 

[8] For an appreciation of the career of Dr. Robert Hershler, see:

• My Buddy Bob [6July22].

[9] I would date the “First Great Environmental Awakening” from the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 to approximately 1916, the creation of the National Park Service.

 

[10] Off the top of his head, Wil could think of eight states with cave protection laws: Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, Missouri, and Pennsylvania.

 

[11] One collection date was 1987, one was 2008.

 

[12] One of those morrisoni was misidentified.  The correct identification was F. tartarea.  I didn’t catch my error until earlier this year, in fresh samples collected by the team 2020 -2025.  More about which next month.

 

[13] The story of the rediscovery of Fontigens cryptica was a fascinating one, which I serialized over a stretch of five years:

• Lori Schroeder’s tiny snails [17July17]
• The most cryptic freshwater gastropod in the world [6Aug17]
• Not finding Fontigens cryptica [6Sept17]
• Finding Fontigens cryptica [3July19]
• Startled by Fontigens, sort-of, I suppose [9Aug22]

[14] Dillon, R.T., Jr., T.E. Malabad, W.D. Orndorff & H-P. Liu (2023) Three new Fontigens (Caenogastropoda: Fontigentidae) from caves in the Appalachian Ridge and Valley Province, Virginia. Pp. 283 - 306 in Dillon, R.T., Jr. et al. The Freshwater Gastropods of North America Volume V: Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee River Systems. FWGNA Press, Charleston.  For a review, see:

• Three New Fontigens from Virginia [9Jan24]

Nevada Desert Worldview Collision

Editor’s Note – Last month we explored the relationship between the worldviews of Art, Science, and Public Policy.  This month we push onward into the worldviews of Business and Commerce, about which I know even less, as we shall see.

Sometimes, I identify snails for money.  I hasten to add that I am always happy to do so for free, if your specimens (or jpeg images thereof) are accompanied by good data, especially if the request is courteous. But sometimes I receive requests from environmental consultancies, who have themselves been contracted to collect the specimens in question, and they expect to pay me as a subcontractor.  Fine, I’ll take your money.  I charge $25 per sample.

Pyrgulopsis kolobensis, Nevada

So in the spring of 2020 I received my first inquiry from an officer of an environmental consulting operation in Colorado whom I will identify as Ms. Nickle-Chaser, or N-C for short.  She wrote a single line over a forward from a mutual colleague recommending me to identify “springsnails in Northern Nevada,” simply adding, “Would you be able to help?” 

I replied in the affirmative.  And there followed the usual back-and-forth about contracts, work authorizations, chains-of-custody and so forth.  I am an utter foreigner in the world of business and commerce – I understand that the motivation is money but cannot imagine how anybody could be so motivated.  I am able to cooperate in such situations as a dog commanded to sit and shake.

Nor, in retrospect, did Ms. N-C understand the language of science and technology in which I addressed her.  Here is a quote from quite early in our negotiations, 29Apr20: 

"I usually work with samples preserved in 70% ethanol, although higher concentrations are better.  The USPO pitches a fit about shipments containing ethanol, however, as do some of the private carriers, sometimes.  So a trick is to put the snails in a little unbreakable vial full of ethanol, and then stuff cotton down in the vial, and then pour off any excess ethanol.  So you can reassure the clerk that your shipment does not contain any liquids.  Just wet cotton, right?"

So, a few weeks later I got an email heads-up from N-C that a 15” x 12” x 15” box weighing 19 pounds was on its way from Denver to Charleston, by UPS next-day air.  And she noted, “Ice will be partially melted I expect.”  Nineteen pounds flown across the country by overnight express?  Good grief, I thought to myself – how much must that cost?  Surely whatever I charge for the identification of a few samples of snails will be dwarfed by the cost of their shipping, yes?

 

And indeed, six samples did arrive quite promptly the following evening.  Each was contained in a wide mouth 500 ml Nalgene bottle of (what smelled like) denatured ethanol, packed in ice, packed in a cooler, double-bagged, packed in a box, elaborately taped, dripping a puddle on my front porch.

 

I was disappointed not to find any locality data for the six samples – just number codes written on the bottles.  Looking back at our early correspondence, I probably should have emphasized the importance of such data with greater urgency.  I do save data on the distribution of all freshwater gastropods collected across the entirety of North America into the FWGNA database.  My excel spreadsheet has 13 columns, including not just state, county, latitude and longitude, but also collector and date of collection, and those data are just as important as the sample specimens themselves, and indeed the latter worthless without the former.

Central Eureka County, Nevada

So I requested locality data in my email confirming receipt, and Ms. N-C replied with lat/long coordinates the next day – six tiny green cracks in the arid Cortez Mountains of Eureka County, Nevada.  And I went to work.

 

The samples turned out to be quite various.  One contained a beetle and a pebble.  Two were unpicked bulk samples, one of which ultimately proved to include snails, and the other of which did not.  And three were clean samples of snails.  These were my results for the four samples that contained snails, as I ultimately reported them on 8June20:

• Three of your samples contained Pyrgulopsis kolobensis, one of the more widespread springsnails of the Great Basin, ranging eastward into Utah.
• One of your samples contained Pyrgulopsis gibba [1], also widespread, ranging west into California.
• Two of your samples also contained common pulmonate gastropods, Lymnaea cubensis and Physa acuta.

And I concluded, “Attached you will find an excel spreadsheet with my detailed results, and an invoice, in the amount of $125.” [2]

 

This information apparently satisfied my customer, and my customer’s client as well.  For in the spring of 2021 I received a second inquiry from N-C, which I was again happy to answer in the affirmative.  And negotiations were exchanged, very nearly identical to those we had exchanged in 2020.  N-C had originally expected to send me “several samples in the June or July timeframe,” but her field trip was slightly delayed.  Here is the message I received 24July21: 

"Hi there. I just wanted to let you know that we are going to begin spring sampling for snails starting tomorrow and will be shipping them toward you hopefully on the 29th but may ship it out on the 30th. We will try to overnight that and get it to you rapidly.  Thanks."

The next morning I sent Ms. N-C a reassuring reply, to the effect that I am retired, and in no hurry whatsoever.  And in boldface I asked her this question: “Why are you planning to send your samples to Charleston by overnight express?  Why not good, old-fashioned US Snail-mail?”  And I signed it, “What is your hurry? Rob”

 

At 10:30 Friday morning 30July21, a three-foot cooler appeared on my doorstep, containing 10 double-bagged 500 ml Nalgene bottles of what smelled like denatured ethanol packed in ice.  Good God, that thing must have weighed 40 pounds.  I acknowledged receipt immediately, reminding her about the necessity of locality data, for which (one would think) there might have been room in each of the 500 ml bottles, somewhere.  And in her reply of 11:46 AM, N-C answered the question I had asked her five days earlier as follows: 

“Years doing water quality monitoring taught me the best way to send samples.  Those suckers are worth thousands of dollars, when you factor in time spent planning, surveying, shipping, etc.  It would be a bummer to have to go back out and resample on our dime.”

And she did follow up with the locality data.  And at that point, there was no reason to argue with her about the 40-pound overnight shipment.  I suppose I might have reviewed some of the differences between a sample of water and a sample of preserved freshwater gastropods, and explored the consequences those differences might suggest in shipping methodology.  But her frame of reference was monetary, not scientific.  She was speaking a language that I did not understand, and I understood that.

 

So again, I went to work.  All ten of the 2021 samples also turned out to have been collected from Eureka County, Nevada, but from wetter environments than the 2020 samples.  Most of these were from ponded springs in pastureland, impacted by cattle.  Only two samples contained hydrobiids (P. kolobensis) but all ten contained pulmonates, with six species represented [3], most interestingly Lymnaea (Galba) bulimoides [4].  I sent Ms. N-C a spreadsheet, a formal report, and an invoice for $250 on 5Aug21, and received payment on 17Sept21.

Lymnaea (Galba) bulimoides, Nevada

And my satisfied customer contacted me again in the springs of 2022 and 2023, and very similar business transactions occurred.  Big coolers appeared on my doorstep by overnight express, filled with ice and Nalgene bottles but not locality data.  The 2022 shipment, ten samples collected from the vicinity of the town of Beatty in Nye County, Nevada, were almost entirely of Physa acuta, with a sprinkling of L. humilis.  For some reason it especially irritated me to see hundreds of dollars spent shipping trash snails across the country by overnight express.  But on the other hand, I was beginning to accumulate a nice collection of free coolers.

 

At this point I feel called to set aside the orderly unfolding of my narrative, and confess a personal shortcoming.  Not only are the language, values, and culture of the World of Business foreign to me, I am unsympathetic to them.  I have spent my entire career with my right foot firmly planted in the World of Science, and my left toe delicately touching the World of Public Policy [5].  In both of those worlds, Pyrgulopsis and Physa are entirely different things.

 

As a scientist, I know that Bob Hershler kicked the five (mostly eastern) species of Pyrgulopsis listed in the (1980) Burch cannon [6] up to 54 (western) species in 1994 [7], and that by the end of his career, Bob was recognizing 126, mostly on the basis of negligible DNA sequence divergence and penial characters of dubious biological significance [8].  My left toe tells me, however, that the Nevada Division of Natural Heritage lists 76 nominal species of Pyrgulopsis within its vastly trapezoidal borders, the great majority of which are ranked “G1 = critically imperiled globally.”

 

So, if Ms. N-C were to discover a population of 3 mm prosobranch snails in a Nevada spring, I might be able to understand some special care in their shipment to an expert across the country.  But if she were to find a population of “those suckers” bearing thin, sinistral shells in the ditch behind a McDonald’s restaurant licking the special sauce off the back of a Big Mac wrapper, she could just send me a jpeg, am I right?  But please, in any and all cases, regardless of what those suckers look like, is it too much to ask for locality data?

Charleston.  August 31, 2024

We were headed for a worldview collision.  On 17July24 I received what had (by that point) become my annual greeting from Ms. N-C, reporting that she had a “very small project in Nevada that needs a snail ID on perhaps 3 samples,” and asking if I would be able to assist.  And I replied that I would be happy to help as usual.

 

And on 31Aug24 a hefty 1.5’ x 2’ x 2’ box arrived with a thump on my doorstep, overnight air from Nevada.  It weighed in excess of 13 pounds.  Inside the box (1) I found four layers of plastic bags (2): damp, wet, soaked, and dripping puddles on my wife’s dining room table.  And inside the fourth bag was (3) a little red cooler exorbitantly taped with three layers of a deceptively-strong clear packing tape that defeated every knife in my kitchen.  And sloshing about within that cooler was (4) a single 500 ml Nalgene bottle of alcohol.  And inside that bottle of alcohol, I found (5) one, single little shell.

 

Not a snail, mind you, a shell.  A single lymnaeid shell of 5.5 mm standard length, translucent in its pristine emptiness.  It had belonged to an individual Lymnaea (Galba) cubensis/viator, which if not a trash snail exactly, let me simply say that whole government agencies have been charged to eradicate.  Thirteen pounds of packing material for an empty shell that could not weigh more than 80 mg.

Lymnaea (Galba) cubensis/viator

 

And where is my GDMF locality data?!?? Vainly I pawed through 13 pounds of dripping debris on my wife’s dining room table for any collection information – where was this specimen collected, when and by whom?  All I found was elaborate chain-of-custody paperwork marked simply “Nevada.”

 

I suppose, in retrospect, I should have laughed.  But in fact, I lost my temper entirely.  I was overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation in the World which I call home.  Having never had a phone number for N-C, I went to my desktop computer to fire off an email, acknowledging receipt.  And I characterized her packing job as “stupid, just plain stupid,” which (I now realize) was over the top.  I continued that I had “no idea whose money she was wasting,” but that I would “no longer be a part of it.”  And I concluded [9], “Here’s the identification of your crappy little shell (Lymnaea cubensis/viator).  But you can keep your crappy $25!”

 

Looking back on that email, with over a year to cool down now, I owe an apology to Ms. Nickle-Chaser.  She was just trying to run a business, and her subcontractor went nuts on her.  The contracts I signed simply said “snails,” and in the world of business, a snail is a snail, even if it’s just a shell.  I feel sure that N-C had adequately budgeted for the elaborate shipping of that empty shell in whatever contract she had signed with whatever strip mall developer or strip mine digger had engaged her services, and that a couple hundred bucks meant nothing to her, much less to them.  I was butting in on a business decision made by Ms. N-C, just as I butt in on that artistic decision made by Ms. Julia Galloway last month.

The world of business and commerce is not compatible with the world of science or the worldview of public policy.  There is no relationship between playing baseball, playing banjo, and playing Hamlet.  But those worldviews are not incompatible either.  Just very simply, and very profoundly different. 

 

I speak the language of science fluently; I can speak a dialect of pidgin-policy; I am profoundly deaf to business. And so, I apologize to Ms. Nickle-Chaser.  But I cannot promise her it won’t happen again, if she ever attempts to reconnect with me, which she has not.

 

Notes

 

[1] For figures of the shell and penial morphology of Pyrgulopsis gibba, together with a brief review of the systematics and evolution of western Pyrgulopsis in general, see:

• Just 125 species of Pyrgulopsis in the American West [7Sept22]

[2] I did not bill for the clean beetle/pebble sample.  But did bill $25 for the snailless bulk sample I had to pick.

 

[3] Lymnaea humilis (8 sites), L. bulimoides (4), Physa acuta (4), L elodes (2), L stagnalis (1), Aplexa elongata (1).

 

[4] In 2021 I was still identifying bulimoides (erroneously) as a subspecies (“techella”) of Lymnaea (Galba) cubensis.  For a review of my laborious untangling of the confusion between bulimoides and cubensis/viator, see:

• What is Lymnaea bulimoides? [13Feb24]
• Oregon, bulimoides, or bust [13Feb25]
• The phantom lymnaeid of the Pacific Northwest [11Mar25]
• Lymnaea (Galba) bulimoides and the NCBI GenDump, with lecture notes on the scientific method [8Apr25]

[5] Well actually, I spent most of my career a sojourner through a third world entirely, that of Education.  And left little mark in that strange land

[6] This is a difficult work to cite.  J. B. Burch's North American Freshwater Snails was published in three different ways.  It was initially commissioned as an identification manual by the US EPA and published by that agency in 1982.  It was also serially published in the journal Walkerana (1980, 1982, 1988) and finally as a stand-alone volume in 1989 (Malacological Publications, Hamburg, MI).

[7] Hershler, R. (1994) A review of the North American freshwater snail genus Pyrgulopsis (Hydrobiidae).  Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology 554: 1 - 115.

 

[8] For more about the career of Dr. Robert Hershler, and his model of the evolutionary relationships among populations of the hydrobiid genus Pyrgulopsis, see:

• My Buddy, Bob [6July22]
• Just 125 species of Pyrgulopsis in the American West [7Sept22]

[9] But added as a PS, “Thanks for the cooler.”

Art, science, and public policy: A dialogue in three languages

I have a lot of friends and family who enjoy travel, and spend a substantial amount of time and money doing it, and imagine that their hobby returns some sort of profit to the intellect or character.  Isn’t travel broadening?  Don’t we learn from exposure to new lands, new cultures, new value systems, new ways of looking at the world?  Yes, of course.  But I found countless worldviews, cultures, and value systems trumpeted in the morning headlines at the end of my driveway this morning, ripe for engagement in the aisles of the grocery store across the street this afternoon.  No further travel is required.

As my loyal readership will attest, I have long been fascinated by the diversity of worldviews I encounter in my workday life, and the relationships between them.  The index item at the right of your screen labeled “Worldview Collision” will link to eight essays on the subject when I push the “submit” button on the present post.

The majority of my seven previous essays have explored the relationship between the worldview of science and the worldview of law or public policy, among the most common of the culture clashes in my experience. To understand their proper relationship I have adapted an analogy I first developed about twenty years ago during the height of the most recent creation/evolution controversies between science and religious faith.  Scientists play baseball, lawmakers and regulatory agencies play banjo.  Those worldviews are not incompatible, in the sense that my father was both a banjo picker and a catcher.  But not compatible, either.  Nobody ever tries to integrate one with the other. 

I favor the baseball/banjo analogy because most of my colleagues in the world of science seem to have a better grasp on the proper relationship between sports and art than between science and anything else, possibly because we are more objective.  We don’t write grant proposals to shortstops, nor debate fiddlers over the 10th grade biology curriculum.

 

Indeed, I rarely interact with artists in my professional life [1].  Thus, an email I received this past August (18Aug25) from one Ms. Julia Galloway [2] fell upon my eye as dew drops from heaven.  She introduced herself as: 

“… a professor and ceramic artist based in Montana. I’m currently working on a project focused on raising awareness about endangered species. For this project, I am creating ceramic urns to represent each threatened, endangered, recovered, and extinct species in the U.S. The project will culminate in the creation of approximately 1,200 urns, with completion expected by 2027.”

Ms. Galloway went on to explain that she had created “400+” urns as of that mid-August date and had (apparently) worked down from the California Condors to the freshwater gastropods, finding her supple hands now poised over a throw of clay to be entitled, “Anthony’s Riversnail.”  And googling about the internet for inspiration, she had found my “fabulous photo” posted on the FWGNA site.  And requested permission to use.

 

How fascinating!  The concept of “endangerment” is purely a matter of law, of course, and “raising awareness” a political objective.  Here an artist addresses a scientist over a matter of public policy. A conjunction of three worlds.

 

On 21Aug25 I replied to Ms. Galloway certifying, as I always do, that all of the images on the FWGNA site are freely available for anybody to use for any purpose whatsoever, and offering to help her in any other way I could.  And I concluded, doing my best to address her in her native tongue: 

“Notice that there's a photo of Leptoxis crassa (“Anthony’s Riversnail”) in situ at the bottom of (the species) page [here].  Which brings me to my final point.  Bless your heart!  These things are brown bumps on a rock.  God made them by throwing little balls of clay at dirt.  If you can make art out of Leptoxis crassa, my cap's off to you.”

 And to the bottom of my email of 21Aug25 I added, “PS – 1,200 urns? Are you nuts?”

Brown bumps in Limestone Creek, AL.

Here the challenge of communication across cultures was on full display.  At no point in her initial email to me, nor indeed in any of her subsequent correspondence, did Ms. Galloway mention the rich symbolism just below the surface of her artwork.  Her urns are modeled after the funerary urns of ancient Egypt.  But, quoting from her website, “displayed empty as a sign of hope.”  Anthony’s Riversnail may be on its sickbed, by this metaphor, but it ain’t dead yet.

 

Ms. Galloway replied immediately thanking me for my “delightful and thoughtful reply,” confessed that she does feel a little bit nuts at times, and asked me if I would like to see images of the urn upon completion. And I responded immediately in the affirmative, and suggesting that she just “throw a couple balls of clay at a flowerpot” to expedite the process.

 

I was tremendously impressed to receive the set of three jpegs below on the afternoon of 22Aug25, less than 24 hours after I had granted Ms. Galloway permission to use FWGNA imagery.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised – with 400 urns down and 800 to go, she must be nothing if not efficient.  Three individual snails were depicted various faces of the Anthony’s Riversnail urn, one snail crawling to the left (a) and two crawling to the right (b, c), as from the vantage point of a wary stonefly.  None of these images was modeled, as far as I could tell, from anything on the FWGNA site.  At least overtly.

 

Although starkly beautiful in their execution, I immediately noticed a couple significant technical problems with this urn.  Or at least, they seemed significant to me.  So on 23Aug25 I addressed my third email to Ms. Galloway.

And this time, I felt compelled to speak a little bit of science.  I began with some background on gastropod coiling, so as to introduce the adjectives “sinistral and dextral,” and noted that no case of sinistrality has ever been documented in the Pleuroceridae, as far as I know.  I then wrote:

“You have depicted three individual snails on your urn, am I correct?  The images of which you labeled on the jpegs you sent me yesterday afternoon AO22-a, AO22-b, and AO22-c, yes?  Snail (b) is bearing a dextral shell, correct as you have sculpted.  But snail (a) and snail (c) are bearing sinistral shells.  Not only is that uncomfortable to my eyes, it is unscientific.”

That seemed harsh.  So I added, to soften the blow:

“Perhaps you were working from (somebody else's) closeup photograph of a pleurocerid animal, reversed in some popular publication or on the internet?   Amateurs often publish reversed images, careless of the difference.  In fact, it seems highly unlikely to me that anybody other than a professional malacologist would ever notice the chirality of the snails you have sculpted on your urn.  So if you want to let it go (as Queen Elsa would suggest) I would certainly understand.”

Well, a couple weeks passed.  And I honestly did not think I would ever hear from Ms. Galloway again.  At the rate of one urn per 24 hours, I imagined that she must be well into the unionid mussels by that point, gastropods let go, gone, and forgotten.  But on 2Sept25, I was most pleased to receive yet another lovely communication from my artist-pen-pal:

“Thank you so much for bringing chirality to my attention! I loved reading your email and learning more about gastropods. It's always a treat when I get to hear someone talk passionately about their field of study (especially when they're brown bumps on a rock).

 

Sometimes species have very few images, which was the case with this species. Not knowing about chirality, I flipped some of the images to give myself more viewing angles and compositional options. Now that I know about how snail shells grow, I would like to remake the urn. Would you happen to have any additional images of Anthony's River Snail that you could share?

 

Thank you again for taking the time to share this information with me and for your support! Take care and I hope to hear from you again soon!”

Well no, I myself did not have any additional photos of L. crassa showing anything that the couple images already posted on the FWGNA species page did not.  But on a whim, I executed simple a google-image search on “Athearnia anthonyi” and landed, of course, on the Wikipedia page [3].  And good grief.  The image at the top of the Wikipedia page is sinistral!

Wikipedia. From Dick Biggins, USFWS.

So on the evening of 4Sept25 I addressed my fourth email message to Ms. Galloway, apologizing on behalf of the entire profession of freshwater malacology, re-assuring her that Dick Biggins (the donor of the photo) is a careful worker and confessing that I could not imagine that he himself would upload a mirror-reversed image.  But regardless of how the error occurred, I was sorry that some member of our extended community had not fixed it by now.  Not it.

 

I then suggested three remedies: (1) Sculpt the Wikipedia image from a mirror, (2) Adjust the Wikipedia image using the Photoshop mirror-image-reverse button, or (3) model from some other pleurocerid. Honestly, at the resolution of a funerary urn, all pleurocerid bodies are indistinguishable.  I sent her a good image of some other pleurocerid individual crawling to the viewer’s right, so that she would have both left-travelling dextral and right-travelling dextral models to work from.

 

And on 7Sept25 Ms. Galloway thanked me once again, and asked me if I would like to see images of “the new and improved urn when it is completed?”  To which I replied in the affirmative.  But I never heard from her again.  And that’s OK.

 

The philosopher Ian Barbour (1923 – 2013) has suggested [4] that there are four ways in which worldviews might relate: (1) independence, (2) dialogue, (3) conflict and (4) compatibility.  Independence is the unexamined status quo, compatibility a pipe dream, and conflict is right out.  I love, love, love dialogue.

 

The relationship I have demonstrated above is (2) a dialogue between the worldview of science and the worldview of art.  One might subclassify it as (2a) science helps art.  Ms. Galloway asked me to help her.  I did everything I could to do so.

 

Science and art are not incompatible, here obviously.  But mark me well.  Science and art are not compatible either.  They are very simply, and very profoundly, different.  Ms. Galloway is an artist, and she took the lead in this interaction, and I (a scientist) did what I could to help her create a work of art, and at no point did anything that happened between us during our entire two-week interaction have anything to do with science whatsoever.  The pleurocerid images she carved into that pot could bear sinistral shells, or dextral shells, or polka-dot shells, it does not matter.  And in fact, she never asked me for any of the free advice I offered her at any point, and in retrospect, I may have been interfering with the creative process, and if I ever hear from her again, I will apologize for butting in.

 

But I can’t help it, I love that sort of thing. The proper relationship between our worldviews is one of dialogue.  A dialogue with a fine artist is like an expedition into the bush with a Hottentot, from the seat of my own kitchen table.

 

And here is the most interesting thing about my two-week dialogue with Ms. Galloway.  This particular artist’s motivation was not artistic, but political. 

 

The Oxford Dictionary defines art as “an expression of human skill producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”  But to quote from Ms. Galloway’s website, she considers her work “a catalyst for social change.” 

 

She selected Anthony’s Riversnail as one of her 1,200 subjects because that particular gastropod was entered onto the Federal Endangered Species list on April 15, 1994, see 59 FR 17994-17998 [5]. And “By creating an urn for each (such) species, (she) is making (rarely-seen) species visible, and through this awareness, compassionate action is possible.”  In other words, Ms. Galloway apparently thinks that the worldview of art and the worldview of politics are compatible, such that the former can influence the latter.

 

Bless her heart.  You will have by now noticed that no representative from the world of politics or public policy walked into the bar with the artist and the scientist to this point in my essay, nor will one subsequently appear.  I myself was awarded a AAAS Congressional fellowship many years ago, and learned just enough of the language spoken on Capitol Hill 1981 – 82 to appreciate my limitations.  And I do know quite a few hardworking biologists employed by natural resource agencies, both state and federal. And speaking now for all the legislative bodies and all the regulatory agencies and all the departments of natural resource management involved in all the endangered species conservation nationwide, as well as the entire [6] gastropod fauna of Limestone Creek, Madison County, Alabama, thanks for the pot.  Not a great likeness, but it’s lovely, dear, it really is.

Dave Michaelson & Randy Sarver

Art and Public Policy have different languages, different cultures, different values, and different ways of looking at the world. That they are not incompatible is witnessed by Ms. Galloway herself, who is both an artist and a social activist.  But the worldviews are not compatible, either.  Neither art nor public policy can affect the other, any more than the marching band affects the halftime score, or the halftime score the marching band.

 

But lest we condescend.  Of all the holders of all the worldviews of all the world – Art, Science, Business, Finance, Law, Medicine, Engineering, Religious Faith, Harry Potter, or Star Trek, we scientists are the most arrogant.  The notion of science-based public policy is just as absurd as pottery-based public policy, and none of us seems to realize it.

 

On the morning of 4Sept25, the same day I was to send my fourth email to Ms. Galloway, I met my good friend Randy Sarver in the parking lot of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Jefferson City. Randy is an excellent biologist, and we have developed a warm relationship over many years, and he helped me unload four flats of empty black-capped vials that used to hold macrobenthic samples collected by the MoDNR 2015 - 2017, and swap them for a fresh batch of MoDNR macrobenthic samples 2017 - 2018. 

 

I am sure that Randy and Dave Michaelson and all our friends at the MoDNR do a great job monitoring the water quality of the Show-Me State, and I would never dream of offering them any advice whatsoever, because I can’t, any more than they would dream of offering me any advice about malacology, because they can’t.  Randy and I are in dialogue.  That’s the thing I love.

 

Notes:

 

[1] I actually did post one previous essay on the relationship between science and art, way back in 2011:

• When Science and Art Collide [4Feb11]

 [2] Learn more about Ms. Galloway from her lavish web presence:

• Julia Galloway [home]
• Endangered Species Project [direct]
• Wikipedia [page]

 [3] Wikipedia, accessed 10Dec25 [link]

 

[4] Here I am generalizing Barbour’s thought on the science – religion relationship to the relationship between worldviews of any sort.  His “fourfold typology” was most clearly stated in:

• Barbour, I. G. (2000) When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners?  Harper, 205 pp.

[5] For the Democrats among my readership, who imagine that findings such as those published in the Federal Register on 15Apr94 have anything to do with science whatsoever, please refresh your memory with the ten essays I have written on the Snake River Physa scandal to date.  Actually, you could skip the first six, if you want, and go straight to:

• The SRALP and the SRNLP: A new hope [14May24]
• The SRALP and the SRNLP: Physa acuta were found [11June24]
• The Twelve Phascinating Physa of Bliss [2July24]
• Cytoplasmic Male Sterility in the Snake River Physa [7Aug24]

[6] Fourteen species comprise the exuberant gastropod fauna of Limestone Creek: four pleurocerids, three hydrobioids [7], three viviparids, and four pulmonates.  I feel certain that all have benefited from the endangered status of their most-famous member.

[7] Counted among the Limestone Creek hydrobioids is a population of Marstonia olivacea, which is a senior synonym of Marstonia ogmorhaphe, which was the other gastropod entered onto the Federal Endangered Species list 15Apr94.  And hence that hydrobiid population should be every bit as federally-protected as the pleurocerid "Athearnia anthonyi," but it isn't, because public policy has absolutely nothing to do with science.  For more, see:

• Is Marstonia olivacea extinct? [19Sept23]