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.
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| 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, packed in a box, bagged, elaborately taped, dripping a puddle on
my 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.
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| 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 elaborated 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.
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| 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. On the other hand, however, 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?
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| 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 (2) four layers of plastic bags: 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.
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| 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:
[9] But added as a PS, “Thanks for the cooler.”
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