The Western Pyrgulopsis: 151 planets in the sky?

I love retirement for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is a good excuse.  I very rarely submit grant proposals or papers to scientific journals anymore, and so very rarely volunteer to review anybody else’s.  I do not attend meetings because – you know – fixed income!  And as for serving on committees, boards, and panels, I have paid my dues.

Pyrgulopsis neritella (A,B) and landyei (C-F). From [1]

But on 28Sept26 I received a courteous email from a Dr. Jacob Burkhart from the US Fish & Wildlife Service, Midwest Regional Office, out in Minnesota somewhere, I think.  He explained that he was working on a team that is completing a “Species Status Assessment for several Pyrgulopsis springsnail species found in the Steptoe Valley of Nevada,” and asked me if I “would be willing to provide a peer review” of their “proposed treatment of springsnail taxonomy.”  And my rusty old armor cracked open just a bit.  His situation was just so pathetic.

So here is my reply, verbatim:

“Well, OK.  One of my favorite quotes in the history of the world comes from Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat: ‘This mess is so big, and so deep and so tall, We cannot pick it up. There is no way at all.’ But I suppose it is my duty to help you try.”

So on 2Oct26 my new friend Jacob sent me a 6-page document entitled “NV Springsnails Taxonomy Summary For Peer Review."  In this document he and two FWS colleagues briefly reviewed their motivation, which turned out to be rooted in that “Megapetition” from the Center for Biological Diversity we reviewed way back in [14July09], see also [18May11].  Jacob and colleagues then soldiered bravely through thirty years of scattered, disorganized, ambiguous, confusing and contradictory gobbledygook, ultimately resolving to “evaluate the following entities for the purposes of this SSA report: P. landyei, P. neritella, P. sulcata, P. sterilis, and P. CS28.”  Bless their hearts.

 

And along with his little document for review, Jacob attached a huge bolus of supporting materials, including an important paper by Mike Young and five colleagues [2] that I will confess to you right now, I had been cravenly avoiding.

 

In early August I had received a comment from Mike at the bottom of my [7Sept22] post to this blog, “Just 125 of Pyrgulopsis in the American West.”  See note [3] about my species count.  I had prophesied that “One day, I feel sure, somebody will come behind (Bob Hershler) and test the 125 (Pyrgulopsis species) that remain.”  And I had concluded “I cannot imagine when, or by whom.  Not it.”

 

In August, Mike Young had answered, “We did it. And it appeared yesterday in Western North American Naturalist.”  To that comment I responded, “Great news! Could you send me a pdf?”  Alas, his answer turned out to be no.  And my effort to download a copy for myself was defeated by a paywall.

 

One of the very few things I do not love about retirement is that I have lost my access to most of the scientific literature being published today.  Sure, I could impose on colleagues in higher education to download a pdf for me, and occasionally I do.  Or, I could kick the Pyrgulopsis can down the road, and pray that the Son of Man might Return in all His Glory before I ever saw it again.

P. neritella (1.3 mm), P. landyei (1.4 mm). From [1]

Mike Young had been most cooperative when I reviewed his 2021 paper on Physa [5] back in 2024, and I knew him to be a hard worker, with excellent technical skills.  I had been impressed both by the quality and the quantity of the data he had gathered for that research effort, especially by the rigor with which he documented every nucleotide in every sequence, and every point to the right of the decimal in every sample site.  He was breathtakingly naïve regarding the biology of his study organisms, and pristinely ignorant of the published literature.  Consequently, he was utterly unable to state an hypothesis, much less test one.  But I was.  And in Mike Young's gigantic trash-snail dataset I discovered a light sprinkling of rare cases bearing directly on the point of important hypotheses.

 

It was a lot of work to mine the diamonds from a mountain of physinine slag, however, and I just was not sure I heard the call to do it again.  The Pyrgulopsis mess is today an order of magnitude worse than the Physa mess was at the dawning of my career, and going in the wrong direction.  Burch’s 1980 Bible [6] listed 16 species of Pyrgulopsis/Fontelicella in North America, and 65 species and subspecies of Physa.  Today we [7] count seven good, biological species of Physa [8], and 151 species of Pyrgulopsis.

 

Don’t get me wrong.  Science is the construction of testable hypotheses about the natural world.  To the extent that our current hypothesis about the western Pyrgulopsis is testable, it is science.  It is the intellectual equivalent of looking into the heavens and describing 151 planets, wandering randomly across the night sky [9].

 

Now here was Mike Young’s Pyrgulopsis paper laid out before me, with all 13 of his supplements in a zipped folder beside, and no sound of the trump, and I was clean out of excuses.  So, I dove in.  And I have never, in a professional career spanning over 50 years, ever laid eyes upon a more splendid dataset, a more cringeworthy analysis, or a more amazing result in the long and glorious history of freshwater gastropod population genetics [10].

 

First, the splendid dataset.  Mike and his colleagues sampled 4,270 individual Pyrgulopsis from 644 locations.  All were sequenced for the mitochondrial COI gene.  And “from each COI clade exhibiting a marked level of divergence and represented by more than one individual” Mike Smith sequenced one or more of three additional genes, mitochondrial ND1, nuclear ITS2 and nuclear 28S. 

 

To these 4,270 lines of data Mike and colleagues added 1,362 Pyrgulopsis sequences previously published, mostly of COI but a smattering of others.  And his entire 5,632-line [11], 22-column data set he made available as an excel spreadsheet in his Supplementary Material 2.  Splendid.

The 644 sample sites of Young et al. [2]

Regarding Mike Young’s analysis, it was, in two words, baroquely arbitrary.  Young characterized his species concept as “phylogenetic… requiring reciprocal monophyly” while specifying “an additional requirement for species-level rather than population-level divergence,” which is so obviously circular one wonders how such reasoning could be entertained in Western thought.  The application of this concept turned out to require such mental gymnastics such as: 

“Requiring reciprocal monophyly for the P. pilsbryana species complex would have resulted in recognizing all specimens as members of the type species, despite many populations exhibiting levels of divergence that were characteristic of valid species among other members of this genus.”

And how, one might wonder, did Mike Young determine that "characteristic" level of species divergence, which seems to have been violated in what he decided a priori must be a P. pilsbryana “complex?”

The best way to summarize Mike Young’s baroquely-arbitrary analysis is to look back from a sample of his results.  The figure below is a tiny slice off the top of Young’s Figure 2, which is intended to relay the results for his Pyrgulopsis pilsbryana “species complex.”  At left is the maximum-likelihood COI tree showing six clusters.  The seven rows of boxes at right relay the results of his “identification of candidate species.”  This little subset of seven nominal species includes four previously-described (bedfordensis, blainica, ignota, and fresti), the daggers by ignota and fresti indicating that they are “not considered part of the pilsbryana complex,” apparently interlopers from some other “complex” unspecified.  There are also two candidate species as yet undescribed (CS21 and CS22), and one “informal group” sampled from Brush Creek “not assigned to a candidate species.”

I do not know how the six COI clusters at left map onto the seven candidate species at right.  Has the “informal group” from Brush Creek been subtracted from the gene tree?  We’ll let that go and soldier on.

Young et al. [2] Figure 2, detail.

Each of the seven rows has 11 columns, each column corresponding to one “species delimitation method.”  For a key to the 11 such methods, see Young’s complete Figure 2 caption at footnote [12].  Orange boxes indicate that this particular COI clade was delimited as a species, gray means no, white means no data, and an asterisk indicates “more than one taxon within the clade.”

 

And the main result I would like to highlight is this.  Six of the seven “candidate species” shown in this tiny slice off the top of Young’s results were in fact subsequently listed in his Table 1 as “valid,” all but that "informal group" from Brush Creek.  This despite the fact that no data were available for anything other than COI sequence for bedfordensis, blainica, fresti, or the as-yet-unnamed CS21 whatsoever.

 

Mike Young’s baroquely-arbitrary classification system ultimately devolved to ad hoc binning on the basis of one, single character.  On COI sequence alone [13], he and his colleagues ultimately listed 21 Pyrgulopsis species as “candidates for synonymy” and identified 17 “previously unrecognized clades” that “were delimited as candidate species,” for a net decrement of 4 species.  Our 151-planet hypothesis is now a 147-planet hypothesis.

 

I belong to an elite generation of evolutionary biologists who are old enough to have been influenced by Sneath & Sokal's numerical taxonomy [15], but not so old as to have forgotten it.  And vividly I remember how systematic biologists of that age used to rage against “single character classifications.”  Even given a genetic basis for the character being analyzed, it was universally understood fifty years ago that populations are the unit of evolution, and universally appreciated that populations demonstrate genetic variation both within and among, and with but a single character any interspecific variance that might be attributable to reproductive isolation cannot be recognized.

 

Note that I said above, “To the extent that our current hypothesis about the western Pyrgulopsis is testable, it is science.”  The bottom line is that Mike Smith’s cringeworthy analysis does not constitute a test.

But stepping back from the species hypothesis entirely, and simply understanding a COI sequence as the single genetic marker that it is.   We have now arrived at Mike Young’s amazing result, and the grand finale of the present essay.  Quoting him verbatim: 

“And given the fairly frequent co-occurrence of taxa—at 100 of the 1101 sites in this study, which is a minimum estimate—more thorough collecting and analysis of specimens from single sites is also warranted.”

Holy crap, could that be true?  The model of the Western Pyrgulopsis I have always borne in my mind has been one of complete allopatry.  One single nominal species per spring, never any more, right?  But returning to Mike’s big Supplement #2 spreadsheet, sorting by location and running an eager finger down the first 1,000 rows or so, I counted six sample sites at which more than a single COI haplotype was discovered.  Wow.  That is quite simply, and quite profoundly, amazing.

 

Mike labeled each COI haplotype as a different “delimited species.”  And in so doing, he unwittingly committed an act of science.  He constructed an hypothesis about the natural world that can actually be tested.  Next month, we test it.

 

Notes:

 

[1] Hershler, R. (1998) A systematic review of the hydrobiid snails (Gastropoda: Rissooidea) of the Great Basin, western United States. Part I. Genus Pyrgulopsis. The Veliger 41: 1-132.

 

[2] Young, Michael K.; Pilgrim, Kristine L.; Miskow, Eric S.; Lundskog, Chante L.; Perez, Kathryn E.; and Schwartz, Michael K. (2026) "Molecular refinement of the taxonomy of Pyrgulopsis springsnails in western North America," Western North American Naturalist: Vol. 86: No. 2, Article 10.  Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/wnan/vol86/iss2/10

 

[3] In my Bob Hershler essay of [6July22] I counted N = 126 species of Pyrgulopsis in the American West by paging through his (2017) “Annotated Checklist” [4].  Apparently molluscabase.org lists N = 151.  I have no insight to offer regarding the origin of this discrepancy.

 

[4] Hershler & Liu (2017) Annotated Checklist of Freshwater Truncatelloidean Gastropods of the Western United States, with an Illustrated Key to the Genera.  US Bureau of Land Management Technical Note 449: 1 – 142.

 

[5] Young, M.K., R. Smith K.L. Pilgrim, and M.K. Schwartz (2021) Molecular species delimitation refines the taxonomy of native and nonnative physinine snails in North America.  Scientific Reports 11: 21739. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-01197-3.  For my review, see:

• 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] 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 the 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] The clarity brought to the Physa of North America is in large part due to the many years of laboratory and field effort logged by myself and my students, the likes of which I could never hope to match with Pyrgulopsis in what remains of my sojourn in this World of Woe.  It is true that a smattering of samples have passed across my lab bench in recent years.  But I must confess, I have never seen a Pyrgulopsis on the hoof.  So, let’s give that jumbo 28-oz can of Bush’s Baked Pyrgulopsis another swift kick, okay? No?

 

[8] The confirmed species of Physa in North America are: acuta, carolinae, gyrina, jennessi, pomilia, vernalis, and zionis.  One might also count Aplexa elongata as number 8. The jury is still out on ancillaria/parkeri. 

 

[9] Without the entry of a single new datum into evidence, Galileo and every other astronomer peering into the night sky of the seventeenth century immediately discarded Ptolomy’s geocentric model of the heavens and embraced Copernicus’ heliocentric model.  Two reasons.  First, the heliocentric theory is powerful, yielding strong predictions about the behavior of planets as yet undiscovered and capable of rejecting planets that cannot exist.  And second, the heliocentric theory is elegant.  I do not understand what has happened to our profession in these latter generations, but I do know this.  Most of the faculty in the university science departments and research institutes of today would not know a theory – elegant, ugly or otherwise – if it bit them on the bottom.

 

[10] Mike Young’s discovery of significant sympatry in the western Pyrgulopis fauna scored 94.1 international amazingness units, edging out the 93.2 iau scored by Bianchi and colleagues back in 1994.  For a complete ranking of the top five, see:

• The third-most amazing research results ever published for the genetics of a freshwater gastropod population [1].  And the fourth-most amazing, too. [3Mar22]

[11] The excel spreadsheet downloadable as Supplementary Material 2 does indeed contain 5,632 lines, but only 5,631 are data, line #1 being the column labels.  Apparently the gene sequence(s) from one individual Pyrgulopsis have been lost, for an error rate of 0.018%

 

[12] The complete caption of Figure 2, from [2]:  "Identification of candidate species for most members of the Pyrgulopsis pilsbryana species complex, structured following highly supported clades (branches with red dots and all collapsed nodes have bootstrap support >85) from the maximum-likelihood tree for the COI gene fragment. Taxa in bold are hypothesized candidate species; those marked with a dagger are not considered part of this complex (see text). Each column depicts the results of 1 species delimitation method (A, ASAP; P, Poisson tree processes; S, statistical parsimony networks) for mitochondrial data (COI, ND1, or the concatenated sequences [CON]) or diagnosability (D) and substantial molecular support (B, bootstrap support ≥85) for nuclear data (ITS2 or 28S). Cell fill denotes whether a COI clade was delimited as a species (orange, yes; gray, no; white, no data). A cell with an asterisk denotes that more than 1 taxon within the clade was delimited. Vertically oriented labels indicate informal group membership for specimens not assigned to a candidate species."

 

[13] Well, to be completely accurate.  One of the species Mike proposed for synonymy was P. vinyardi, under P. gibba.  That confirms the result Hsiu-Ping Liu and I published in the gray literature back in 2021 [14], finding no evidence of disequilibrium between COI and penial morphology.  So in the single particular case of P. vinyardi, the evidence of synonymy is more than just mtDNA sequence.

 

[14] Liu, H-P, and R. T. Dillon, Jr. (2021) Resolving the species status of Surprise Valley Pyrg (Pyrgulopsis gibba) and Vineyard Pyrg (Pyrgulopsis vinyardi).  Report to Stantec Environmental Consulting. FWGNA Circular 6: 1 – 5. [pdf]  For a review, see:

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

[15] Sneath, P.H.A, and R.R. Sokal (1973) Numerical Taxonomy: The Principles and Practice of Numerical Classification.  W. H. Freeman. 573 pp.  

The ICE Detention Center and the Snail

OK, listen up!  It seems likely to me that the title of this month’s essay may attract more than the usual trickle of casual surfers and random googlers to this arcane little crack in the internet.  You new visitors and guests will not find anything newsworthy in the paragraphs that follow, nor any information relevant to any ongoing controversy, nor anything interesting, entertaining, nor probably even intelligible.  And absolutely no politics!  This is a blog post written by a snail scientist, for snail scientists.  Everybody else, please go away.  You’re scaring us.

Now for my colleagues still remaining, all six of you all.  Here is the background.  In the late morning of Wednesday 1Apr26 [1] I missed two phone calls but did successfully receive a voicemail and a follow-up email from one Ms. Maddi O’Neill with the subject line, “Media request on deadline.”  In her email, Ms. O’Neill identified herself as a freelance journalist based in Baltimore. And here, verbatim, is the background she supplied, which is really all I know about the political controversy to this day:

“I'm working on a story about a proposed ICE detention center in Washington County, Maryland, and the state of Maryland's effort to block its construction through litigation. Maryland's lawsuit hinges on the need for an Environmental Impact Statement, which the feds have not completed, and points to possible harms to state-endangered species and species in need of conservation that live near the proposed detention center site. Specifically, the state references [2] … the Appalachian springsnail, and I was wondering if you'd be open to speaking with me for a story.”

A quick google search on my part reminded me [3] that the “Appalachian springsnail” is Fontigens bottimeri.  For background on the biology of that obscure little black speck of a gastropod see the FWGNA [species page], and for contextualization see my essays of [9Aug22] and [12Feb26].

At the Hopewell Road entrance.

So I returned Ms. O’Neill’s phone call right away, and we arranged a convenient time for a telephone interview a couple days later, Friday morning 3Apr26.  In the interim, I did a bit of homework – googling up more info on the proposed ICE Detention Center, located on a 54-acre site in the crotch of I-81 and I-70, just north of Williamsport. 

I initially labored under the false impression that the feds were proposing to construct a new facility.  But in fact, their proposal was to repurpose an 800,000 square foot warehouse already on that site, newly constructed (on speculation? really?) but never used [7].  The monstrosity was large enough to have two addresses: 10900 Hopewell Road and 16220 Wright Road.

And digging through the FWGNA database, I found a Fontigens bottimeri record in the Smithsonian (USNM-874706) collected by one D. Feller in 1991 from “Kemps Spring No. 4,” the lat/long coordinates of which (39.6136, -77.8136) mapped just a half mile East of 16220 Wright Road.  I also took the opportunity to email my buddy Matt Ashton at the Maryland DNR for his input but received no response [8].

I really enjoyed getting to know Ms. Maddi O’Neill, however, in our roughly 30-minute telephone conversation Friday.  It turned out that she herself was planning a field trip to hunt Fontigens in the waters around the proposed detention center.  I like that sort of positive mental attitude.  I did my best to help her over the phone, emphasizing that Fontigens populations are restricted [9] to springs and spring runs – cold, clear, pristine 100% groundwater.

And I was pleased to receive a couple follow-up texts from Ms. O’Neill Sunday afternoon 12Apr26, apparently in the field, asking for the lat/long coordinates of Kemps Spring #4, and following with several photos of individual Lymnaea humilis perched on her finger. Bless her heart!

So on 27Apr26 she texted me a link to her article, newly published in an online magazine called “Slate,” [html].  I found the article behind a paywall.  But I was so curious to read it that I ponied up the dough for a three-month subscription, so I could copy-and-paste the text into a [pdf] document, here:

An Ingenious New Strategy for Blocking ICE Detention Warehouses Depends on a Minuscule Snail, by Madeleine O’Neill.

Spoiler alert!  Our friend Maddi did not find any Fontigens bottimeri.  But by that point I had already made plans to drive up I-81 to Williamsport and do the survey right.

I laid out a sampling scheme with five sites down Semple Run (A, B, C, D, F), the little stream just beneath the gigantic warehouse at 16220 Wright Road.  I had also noticed, using the yellow man on Google street view, what looked like an old springhouse by Wright Road not 100 yards down the hill from 16220 (E). And of course, I dropped a pin (G) on 39.6136, -77.8136.  At which coordinates I could find no evidence of a spring on any map available to me.  Satellite imagery seemed to suggest that point was in somebody’s back yard.

So the bright sunny morning of Tuesday, 5May26, found me touring around the besieged little valley of Semple Run.  And the first entry into my field notebook was this: “Semple Run low and clear over silt and debris. 150 years a ditch through ag fields, a ditch under the interstate thereafter.”

Marl falls at Site (D).

From the topo maps, it had seemed possible to me that Semple Run might bear a lot higher proportion of groundwater than it actually carries here in the 21st Century.  The current picked up speed downstream, over a cobble bottom, with some marl.  But alas, at no point was the environment fit for Fontigens, headwaters to mouth [10].  I found patchy populations of the usual Physa (both acuta and gyrina) and Maddi’s Lymnaea (Galba) humilis in the five sample sites I had marked down its length, and (quite unexpectedly) a couple individual Helisoma trivolvis, doing the anceps job. No limpets.  Period.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, the Wright Road springhouse (E) was bone dry, alas again.  The ground was boggy below the springhouse, on the other side of Wright Road, no habitat for Fontigens in evidence.

Springhouse at Site (E).

And what of Kemps Spring #4?  I parked at the south end of Celeste Drive, walked over the railroad tracks, and knocked on the door of the lovely circa 1820 brick farmhouse at 39.6136, -77.8136, repeatedly.  And a dog inside barked loud enough to wake the dead.  And nobody came to the door.  So, I let myself through the gate into the back yard and toured around, finding no evidence of spring nor springhouse.

Ultimately a nice lady, in her dishabille (as my mother used to say) came out to greet me [11].  She confirmed that no spring exists on her property, nor has any spring ever existed in that neighborhood to her knowledge, although she was familiar with the dry springhouse at Wright Road, on the other side of the tracks.  It seems likely to me that the dry springhouse at site (E) was indeed built over Kemps Spring #4, with an error of 0.0012 degrees latitude and 0.0070 degrees longitude.

Big farmhouse at Site (G).

“Lovely farmland spoiled.”  That’s the last note in my field book for the morning of May 5, 2026.  And back at the truck, as I shucked off my boots, it occurred to me that same observation would apply equally to the country around my own hometown of Waynesboro [12], two hours south, in the same sprawl that has enveloped the country around Williamsport.  And indeed, sadly, the Great Valley of Virginia.  And as one of my favorite philosophers once observed, “If this valley is lost, Virginia is lost.”  And if Virginia is lost, what of America?

Notes:

[1] Yes, the thought that this might be an April Fool’s joke did occur to me.

[2] Ms. O’Neill also mentioned “the brook floater mussel, the green floater mussel,” as well as “a few species of fish.”

[3] Somewhat startlingly, the “AI overview” at the top of my google results for “Appalachian springsnail” referred back to me, myself, in a pdf document I posted on my own FWGNA site for the Commonwealth of Virginia back in 2011 [pdf].  At the request of my buddy Brian Watson, I had included the common name below the scientific name.  Otherwise, none of the other nine hits on the first page my google search for “Appalachian springsnail” were relevant [4].

[4] By contrast, my exploratory search for “Fontigens bottimeri” returned much more relevant information, including my species page on the FWGNA site.  In fact, from my search on Fontigens bottimeri I found the relevant US FWS species page, at which F. bottimeri is called the “Potomac Springsnail [5].”

[5] Whose ridiculous idea was it [6] to conjure out of thin air an elaborate parallel taxonomy of “common names” for obscure little creatures that legitimately have no common name?  When I was in fifth grade, my teacher explained that the binomial system of nomenclature was proposed by Linnaeus in 1753 to solve the chaos of multiple common names for the same organism.  Now it is happening again!  We have two “common names” for the same tiny little black speck-snail that never had a common name to begin with.

[6] Turgeon, D.D., J.F. Quinn, A.E. Bogan, E.V. Coan, F.G. Hochberg, W.G. Lyons, P.M. Mikkelson, R.J. Neves, C.F.E. Roper, G. Rosenberg, B. Roth, A. Scheltema, F.G. Thompson, M. Vecchione, and G.D. Williams (1998) Common and scientific names of aquatic invertebrates from the United States and Canada: Mollusks (second edition), American Fisheries Society Special Publication 26, Bethesda, Maryland, 526 pp.

[7] A deserted warehouse on the edge of town, seriously?  Staffed with henchmen, wearing black turtleneck sweaters, perhaps?

[8] I followed up with Matt on Tuesday morning 4/28.  He replied that “Because the State, and specifically the Secretary of DNR, is party to an ongoing lawsuit, I referred your inquiry to our Public Relations Manager, Gregg Bortz.”  I have yet to hear from Mr. Bortz.

[9] To be complete, F. nickliniana populations in the East and F. aldrichi in Missouri can extend some significant distance downstream.  But F. bottimeri populations, in my limited experience, are restricted to the springhead and immediate spring run.

[10] See Maddi’s April 27 article for a nice photo of Semple Run tumbling under Celeste Road at Site (F).

[11] I did apologize, sincerely and profusely.  Okay, it was 8:30 AM, still early, I suppose.  I honestly thought that all the racket I made on her front porch would have brought her to the door, but no.  I did not get her name.

[12] See here for a tribute to my home town of Waynesboro, Virginia:

• The Clean Water Act at 40 [7Jan13]

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 newspaper 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 controversy 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 on his high school baseball team.  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 in the former situation.  We don’t write grant proposals to shortstops, nor debate fiddlers over the 10th grade biology curriculum.

 

Nor collaborate with artists [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 gasping for breath, 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 the imagery.  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]