The freshwater gastropods of Georgia Gulf drainages

We here in South Carolina think of Georgia as our younger brother, now outgrown us.  The colony to our immediate south was founded in 1732 to protect us from Spaniards, and in that function, at least, has been largely successful.  Our port cities, Charleston and Savannah, have grown up as sisters.  Our capital cities, Atlanta and Columbia, were both burned by Sherman.  We take turns beating Alabama for national championships.  Georgia grows more onions; we grow more peaches.

But if there is any honor of which our younger brother boasts that we here in South Carolina might envy, it is topographic diversity.  From North Georgia arise real mountains, the southern terminus of the ancient Appalachians.  And from those mountains are born rivers flowing in four directions through six USEPA Level III Ecoregions: north to the Tennessee/Ohio, west to the Alabama/Mobile Basin, south to the Gulf and east to the Atlantic.  The luxuriant aquatic biodiversity of Georgia more than compensates for any shortfall it might suffer in production of cannable fruit.

FWGGA v1.0, release 26Mar07

The Freshwater Gastropods of Georgia (FWGGA) web resource debuted online (at our old cofc.edu address) way back in 2007 with a survey of the Atlantic drainages of Georgia only, approximately 45% of the state.  Our database at that time comprised 845 records of 37 species.  It was migrated (as v2.0) to its present address in 2010, and saw minor upgrades (with additional data and fresh maps) in 2013 (v2.1) and 2024 (v2.2).  So as of last month, the FWGGA website v2.2 reported 960 records of 41 species and subspecies.  But that was for the Atlantic drainages alone.

Speaking now for myself and my coauthors Martin Kohl, Will Reeves, and Tim Stewart, today we are pleased to announce Version 3.0 of the FWGGA web resource, now expanded to include the Gulf drainages of Georgia, extending through 11 counties of the Florida panhandle between the Apalachicola and Suwanee Rivers.  Our database has grown to 1,608 records, documenting 56 species and subspecies of freshwater gastropods in the 85% of Georgia now covered.  Check it out today!

[FWGGA v3.0]

 

Most of our new records were gleaned from the extensive and well-curated mollusk collection held by the University of Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.  Our initial search of the FLMNH online database returned 577 freshwater gastropod records from the Gulf drainages of Georgia and 495 from the 11 Florida counties downstream, for a total of 1,074 records in our enlarged study area.  Simple duplicates – records differing only by date or method of preservation, for example – were removed.  The records were then screened by three primary criteria: (1) dated since 1955, (2) locality data of sufficient quality to be plottable, and (3) habitat not brackish, as far as could be determined.

 

That last requirement turned out to be surprisingly restrictive.  Dr. Fred G. Thompson, who was the senior curator of mollusks at the FLMNH for 50 years, specialized in the hydrobioid snails.  And the museum cabinets that survive him in Gainesville to this day are packed with teensy-little vials full of teensy-weensier little gastropods, collected across every square foot of the Sunshine State, curated with great care.

 

FWGGA v3.0, release 19May25

The hydrobioid snails – especially the cochliopids – are famous for their adaptation to varying salinity.  Ultimately, however, we found it necessary to eliminate Heleobops, Onobops, and Littoridinops monroensis/palustris from our survey, because we could not find any records of any of these inhabiting entirely fresh waters in the area under study here.  That last omission was especially surprising, because Littoridinops monroensis was described from the (entirely fresh) upper St. Johns River system on the Atlantic side of Florida [1].  But this is the Freshwater Gastropods of North America Project, not the brackish, and we must draw a line somewhere, even if our study organisms do not.

So.  This past February I printed the resulting list of 454 panhandle Florida + 255 Gulf Georgia = 709 FLMNH records on a clipboard and made an appointment with our good friend and colleague John Slapcinsky, the collection manager way down south in Gainesville.  And we must take a moment to thank, from the bottom of our hearts, our buddy John for his infinite patience, great good humor, and skillful manipulation of the local parking authority hosting us during our most recent sojourn on his sprawling campus.  All identifications were verified, or (if the corresponding museum lot could not be located), deleted.

All qualified, verified lots of freshwater gastropods from our GA/FL Gulf drainage study area were then georeferenced and plotted.  As a rule of thumb, the FWGNA requires that no pair of records for a single species be collected from the same body of water any closer than 5 km.  Removal of the older record from all such near-duplicate pairs yielded a total of 257 Florida + 230 Georgia = 487 unique, modern, verified, georeferenced FLMNH freshwater gastropod records from the Gulf drainages of our two-state study area.  These were added to the 392 older Atlantic-drainage records, to yield the total of 879 FLMNH records analyzed in FWGGA version 3.0.

 

The additional 161 records newly reported in the FWGGA expansion were almost entirely collected by RTD using simple untimed searches 2003 - 2025, specifically targeting freshwater gastropod habitat [2].  Ultimately our survey covered approximately 645 discrete sample sites, located across the Atlantic and Gulf drainages of Georgia, extending through the 11 counties of the Florida panhandle between the Apalachicola and the Suwanee.  See the map above.  No “absence stations” are shown.  If freshwater gastropods were not collected at a site, then no record resulted. 

Marstonia castor UF22178

Our entire 1,608 record database is available (as an excel spreadsheet) from yours truly upon request.

The list of 56 species and subspecies of freshwater snails we have documented from our study area omits Marstonia castor, described by Thompson in 1977 as endemic to Cedar Creek in Crisp County, Ga [3].  Although the FLMNH collection also includes more recently-collected lots of M. castor from Swift Creek (Crisp Co) and Mercer Mill Ck (Worth Co), our 2023 efforts to locate a viable population anywhere in the region were unsuccessful.  The FWS listed M. castor as extinct in 2017, and we concur.

Combining subspecies for analysis, the freshwater gastropod fauna of the region under study here reduces to 53 species: 35 prosobranchs and 18 pulmonates.  Of the pulmonates, three are extralimital or introduced: Biomphalaria, Promenetus, and Physa gyrina. Helisoma scalare is Floridian.  The remaining 14 pulmonate species are all common throughout the southeastern United States, in some cases stratified by ecoregion: Physa carolinae and Helisoma trivolvis (for example) restricted to the coastal plain, Ferrissia rivularis in the piedmont and mountains.

 

A Gradual Transition

More biogeographic signal is apparent in the prosobranchs.  Of the 35 prosobranch species we identified in our study area, 10 are unique to the Gulf drainages, 10 are unique to the Atlantic drainages, and 15 are shared across the state of Georgia broadly.  This observation does not support the hypothesis advanced by Thompson & Hershler [4] that “with the exception of Lyogyrus and two species of Viviparus,” the prosobranch faunas of the Atlantic and Gulf drainages of Georgia “have no species in common.”  Rather, the distributions of the freshwater gastropods of Georgia apparently reflect a gradual transition or blending between the faunas of Atlantic drainages to the east, Alabama/Coosa drainages to the west, and Florida to the south.

 

The DFS Zone

Our modern survey has, however, corroborated the 1991 observations of Thompson & Hershler [4] that the drainage basins of the Satilla and the St. Marys Rivers of the Atlantic drainage, plus the upper portions of the Suwannee and Ochlockonee River systems of the Gulf drainage, are virtually “devoid of freshwater snails.”  The striking absence of sample sites in that region clearly evident on the map above is not due to a lack of effort on our part.  We travelled that area extensively, donning boots and searching keenly, ultimately returning with no freshwater gastropod observations to report.  We here refer to that region as the “DFS Zone,” for “devoid of freshwater snails.”

 

Citing evidence from the paleontological results of Aldrich [5], Thompson and Hershler suggested that the DFS Zone had a rich freshwater gastropod fauna in the Pleistocene, similar to that of surrounding regions today, and attributed the depauperization of the modern fauna to “water chemistry factors” recent in their origin.  We ourselves are hesitant to generalize the fresh/brackish Pleistocene malacofauna catalogued by Aldrich from the lower Satilla across the entire DFS Zone.  But the hypotheses that Thompson & Hershler advanced regarding the influence of bedrock and soil type on water chemistry, and the influence of water chemistry upon freshwater gastropod distributions, are well supported [6].

To live and die in Dixie...

The Satilla, the St Marys, the upper Suwanee and the upper Ochlockonee drainages in South Georgia are underlain by Cretaceous gravels and sands, yielding soft, acidic, low-carbonate surface waters to which freshwater gastropod populations are often poorly adapted.  And to the inhospitable water chemistry of this region, we would hasten to add the inhospitable water physics.  Silt.

 

Clench & Turner [7] suggested that “the greatest source of damage” to the freshwater mollusk fauna of the Georgia Gulf drainages “seems to be land erosion and consequent silting of the rivers.”  For over a century, most of the state was intensively farmed for cotton, stream bank to stream bank.  Harding and colleagues [8] reported that the best predictor of current macroinvertebrate diversity in East Tennessee river systems is not present land use, but rather land use prior to 1950.  We suggest that the intensive burdens of silt that have been carried, and that continue to be carried, by the rivers of South Georgia, together with the softness, acidity, and poor buffering capacity of the regional surface waters, account for the phenomenon we here describe as the DFS Zone.

Although relatively minor in areal extent, the expansion of FWGNA coverage to include this diverse little drip of North American freshwater nevertheless resulted in the addition of 9 new gastropod species and subspecies to the 136 previously included in our coverage, bringing our continental total to 145.  Come visit us again, for the first time!

 

Notes:

 

[1] Von Frauenfeld, G. R. (1863) Verhandel. Kais. Konig. Zool. Botan. Ges. Wein 13: 1023.

 

[2] Dillon, R.T., Jr. 2006. Freshwater Gastropoda. pp 251 - 259 In The Mollusks, A Guide to their Study, Collection, and Preservation. Sturm, Pearce, & Valdes (eds.) American Malacological Society, Los Angeles & Pittsburgh.

 

[3] Thompson, F.G. (1977) The hydrobiid snail genus Marstonia.  Bulletin of the Florida State Museum, Biological Sciences 21: 113 – 158.

 

[4] Thompson, F.G. & R.H. Hershler. 1991. Two new hydrobiid snails (Amnicolinae) from Florida and Georgia, with a discussion of the biogeography of freshwater gastropods of South Georgia streams. Malac. Rev. 24:55-72.

 

[5] Aldrich, T.H. (1911) Notes on some Pliocene fossils from Georgia with descriptions of new species.  Nautilus 24: 131 – 132, 138 – 140.

 

[6] For a review of the effects of calcium concentration and related water chemical variables on the distribution of freshwater gastropods, see pages 326 – 338 in:

• Dillon, R.T. Jr (2000) The Ecology of Freshwater Molluscs.  Cambridge University Press. 509 pp.

[7] Clench, W.J. & R.D. Turner. 1956. Freshwater mollusks of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida from the Escambia to the Suwannee River. Bull. Fl. State Mus., Biol. Sci. 1:95-239.

 

[8] Harding, J.S., E.F. Benfield, P.V. Bolstad, G.S. Helfman and E.B.D. Jones (1998) Stream biodiversity: The ghost of land use past. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95: 14843 - 14847.

The Freshwater Gastropods of The Great Plains

We are pleased to announce a major expansion of the FWGNA Project, now extending our coverage westward to include the prairie states of Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota.  The Freshwater Gastropods of the Great Plains, by Bruce J. Stephen, Robert T. Dillon, Jr, and Martin Kohl is now online and available for reference!  Check it out:

Visit the FWGGP

In this important new web resource, we report the results of an original survey of 795 rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds across a big slice of the American heartland, documenting 33 gastropod species.  For each species we provide range maps and ecological notes, with a photo gallery and a dichotomous key for easy identification.

Although in areal extent our 308,000 square mile Great Plains study area is the largest of the eight regions thus far covered by the FWGNA Project, by freshwater gastropod species richness it is the smallest.  We suggest two historical factors to account for the relative poverty of the Great Plains malacofauna: the absence of landform diversity, and the absence of time sufficient for a regionally adapted fauna to evolve.  The effects of Pleistocene glaciation, if any, seem to have been to increase species richness.  State subtotals were 16 species in Kansas, 18 in Nebraska, 19 in South Dakota, and 23 in North Dakota.

We also document reductions in species richness for three of the four Great Plains states when compared to expectation from the published literature.  Kansas seems to have lost 4 species, South Dakota 6 and Nebraska 14.  The freshwater gastropod species apparently missing from each state typically become more common further north.  Although some of this phenomenon is certainly due to sampling error, we think it likely that climate change may have been a factor in the decreased species richness of The Great Plains.

FWGNA Volumes 5, 6, and 7 Now Available!

It is our great pleasure to announce the publication of Volumes 5, 6, and 7 in the Freshwater Gastropods of North America series, now extending FWGNA coverage from U.S. Atlantic drainages into the Ohio, Cumberland and Tennessee River systems of the American interior.  These three important new references, essential for the libraries of malacologists, aquatic biologists and natural resource managers with interests anywhere in the East, are now available at a substantial discount directly from the print shop, only to friends of the FWGNA Project.

FWGNA Volume 5, by Dillon, Kohl, Winters, Pyron, Reeves, Watters, Cummings, Bailey and Whitman [1], reports the scientific results of a freshwater gastropod survey covering all or part of 14 U.S. states, a total study area of over 200,000 square miles.  Our database of 9,370 records, sampled from approximately 4,250 distinct sites, was drawn from museums (24%), state natural resource agencies (34%), and personal collections.

We document 80 species and 19 subspecies of freshwater gastropods in this malacologically rich region.  For each we provide: 

• A dichotomous key for identification. 
• Full-color figures. 
• Range maps at county scale. 
• Notes on habitat, ecology, life history and reproductive biology. 
• Systematic and taxonomic updates to modern standards.

Three new species of cave-dwelling hydrobioid snails: Fontigens hershleri, F. benfieldi, and F. davisi, are described in the appendix [2].

Our complete FWGNA database, updating Atlantic drainage records and combining them with our fresh data from the interior, now comprises 22,044 records documenting 107 species of freshwater gastropods, with 21 subspecies.  In Volume 5 we offer a new continent-scale biogeographic analysis, dividing records into North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Ohio, and Tennessee/Cumberland subsets.  Our analysis suggests that natural selection has been more important in the evolution of freshwater pulmonate snails than gene flow restriction, but that gene flow restriction has been more important in the evolution of freshwater prosobranch snails than natural selection.

In Volume 1 (2019) we pioneered a new method to rank freshwater gastropods by incidence categories for the purposes of conservation, based on the work of K. J. Gaston.  Here in Volume 5 that system is updated to include all 107 species across all regions, re-assigning incidence ranks as necessary.

Our modern understanding of the taxonomy and systematics of the North American freshwater gastropod fauna is a function of both the natural history of the vast rivers, lakes and streams through which that diverse fauna has evolved, and the human history of the biologists who have come behind, struggling to catalog the biodiversity as it has elaborated before their eyes.  In FWGNA Volume 6 [3] we collect 32 essays, originally published on the present blog 2019 – 2023, exploring the relationship between natural history, human history, and the evolutionary models we impose today upon the pleurocerid snails of the American interior, and upon the hydrobioid snails, broadly understood.

Featured topics include intrapopulation gene flow, barriers to dispersal, character phase disequilibrium, and speciation.  Special attention is called to the phenomena of cryptic phenotypic plasticity and mitochondrial superheterogeneity, both of which were introduced in Volume 3 of the present series (2019).  Along the way we meet Professor Gerard Troost, who was twice-captured and ransomed by privateers, Captain S. S. Lyon, who singlehandedly saved the Union command of George W. Morgan in 1862, and Dr. Isaac Lea, the Nestor of American Naturalists, who drives us nuts.  Together these 32 studies comprise an essential companion to the scientific results of the 14-state survey of the freshwater gastropod fauna The Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee River systems published in Volume 5.

And what is the place of freshwater snails in modern culture, if any?  Does their alleged rarity and undeniable strangeness elicit conservation concern in small circles of the environmentally conscious?  Might even smaller circles of professionals in tropical medicine and health worry about their potential to host parasitic diseases?  And aren’t some freshwater snails invasive?  Or maybe they’re just cute pets?

Collected in FWGNA Volume 7 [4] are 36 essays, originally published in the genre-defining artistic universe known as the FWGNA Blog, exploring freshwater gastropod biology in the modern milieu.  Our focus here is on the larger prosobranchs – the viviparids and the ampullariid “mystery snails” – as well as on the familiar pulmonate snails of the hobbyist aquarium and the lab bench. 

Reproductive allocation and the species concept, especially as applied to asexually-reproducing populations, emerge as primary themes, together with the omnipresent phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity.  And along the way we’ll check in with Gary, a pet mystery snail, who doesn’t smell so good.  The essays collected here will be an essential companion both to the Volume 1 results of the FWGNA surveys of Atlantic drainages published in 2019, and to the results of the Volume 5 Ohio drainage surveys published alongside.

Buy Yours Now!

The retail price of these three indispensable volumes, if purchased separately, would be $56.00 + $48.89 + $53.79 = $158.68.  But we have worked out a special deal with the print shop for friends of the FWGNA Project.  Go directly to my author page on the printer’s website, link above.  Add each of the three new titles [5] separately to your cart and proceed to checkout.  At the checkout page you will find a box to enter a “coupon code.”  Apply the coupon code FWGNA3 to each of the three volumes.  This will discount your price to $99.95 for the set.  A bargain!

Notes

[1] Dillon, R.T. Jr., M. Kohl, R. Winters, M. Pyron, W.K. Reeves, G.T. Watters, K. Cummings, J. Bailey, & M. Whitman (2023a) Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee River Systems.  Freshwater Gastropods of North America, Volume 5.  FWGNA Press, Charleston, SC. 315 pp.

[2] 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. [pdf]

[3] Dillon, R.T., Jr. (2023b) Yankees at The Gap, and Other Essays. Freshwater Gastropods of North America Volume 6.  FWGNA Press, Charleston, SC.  306 pp.

[4] Dillon, R.T., Jr. (2023c)  Collected in Turn One, and Other Essays.  Freshwater Gastropods of North America Volume 7.  FWGNA Press, Charleston, SC. 345 pp.

[5] Oh, and the special deal we worked out for Volumes 1 – 4 back in 2019 is still valid.  If you follow the entire procedure outlined above for Volumes 1 – 4 and add the coupon code FWGNA4, you will receive a discounted price of $99.95 for that set as well.

Atlantic Drainages Update

Our hunger to advance the cause of freshwater gastropod science is insatiable here at the general headquarters of the FWGNA Project.  I’m always scanning the literature for the latest research and looking to add new records to the database, even for those regions we covered and published many years ago, from which we seem to have long moved on.  We haven’t “moved on” from anywhere.  Our coverage extends over all or part of 17 states, expanding south and west, active to the present day.

But it has been ten years – if you can believe it – since we last updated the five web resources that cover the freshwater gastropod fauna of U.S. Atlantic drainages:  Georgia (FWGGA), South Carolina (FWGSC), North Carolina (FWGNC), Virginia (FWGVA) and the Mid-Atlantic (FWGMA).

Fresh 2023 Format

So a couple months ago we were able to twist the arm of our good friend Martin Kohl to help us with a fresh set of maps, which is the biggest piece of the chore.  And today we are pleased to announce that the results of Martin’s considerable GIS skills are now available for download from the pages of the 72 species and subspecies of gastropods inhabiting rivers, lakes, ponds and streams of the vast (ten-state) Atlantic-drainage area.

The maps newly available for 2023 are built on a database of 12,138 records.  That number represents a 4.2% reduction from the 12,674 Atlantic-drainage records upon which we based our (most recent) Synthesis v3.1 and Biogeography v2.0 back on 12May22.  The new total reflects a pruning of our FWGNC database from 4,425 down to 3,809 records to remove a big batch of near-duplicate samples, collected by NCWRC teams upstream and downstream from bridges, for example.

Other FWGNA Atlantic-drainage databases have been slightly augmented by routine collecting, however, up from 895 to 960 in Georgia, from 1,938 to 1,989 in South Carolina, from 2,333 to 2,396 in Virginia, and from 3,150 to 3,159 in the Mid-Atlantic states.  Note that the sum of those five figures totals slightly more than 12,138 due to double counting where rivers comprise state lines.

Our 2013 maps emphasized rivers, streams, and vegetative cover.  Our new 2023 maps have been significantly reformatted to show the major USGS/EPA Ecoregions, with counties and cities (very lightly) in the background.  Close comparison of the two examples (above and below) will reveal a slight reduction in data density for North Carolina, and some fresh data mapped, especially in Georgia.

Old 2013 Format

The contents of all 128 species pages on the FWGNA site have also been refreshed in recent months – not just the 72 species and subspecies of Atlantic drainages.  I am always on the lookout for new research to add to the bibliographies – ecology, life history, systematics, evolution – anything and everything, really.

Whenever any of you publish anything new, please send me a link or a reprint.  Indeed, if you happen to read a new paper with especially interesting or important results on any aspect of the biology of North American freshwater gastropods, written by anybody else, I always appreciate a heads-up.

For many years, my customary sign-off has been, “Keep in touch.”  I mean it, I’m serious!

Freshwater Gastropods of the Tennessee/Cumberland

Today we are pleased to announce the expansion of our FWGTN coverage from its East Tennessee origins though the entirety of the Tennessee and Cumberland River drainage basins, increasing our sampling area from approximately 22,000 square miles to over 58,000.  We document 54 species of freshwater gastropods with 16 additional subspecies in this malacologically rich region, offering ecological and systematic notes for each, as well as detailed distribution maps, a dichotomous key and a photo gallery.  This expanded web resource, coauthored by R.T. Dillon, M. Kohl and R. Winters, is available here:

The Tennessee/Cumberland

The previous version of our FWGTN website, brought online in 2011 by Dillon & Kohl, covered only the Tennessee River drainage system from SW Virginia and western North Carolina through East Tennessee to skim the top of North Georgia and stop at the Alabama border.  Our 2011 database included 1,674 records from approximately 767 discrete sites, documenting 39 species and 2 subspecies.  The expanded database we release today includes 4,003 records from approximately 1,700 discrete sites, ranging though North Alabama and Middle Tennessee to clip the corner of NE Mississippi, plus a big slice across southern Kentucky as well.

Click for larger

Among many interesting findings, we report here that three pleurocerid species previously thought restricted to East Tennessee range significantly further west: Pleurocera simplex (with its subspecies ebenum), Pleurocera troostiana (with subspecies perstriata, edgariana, and lyonii) and Pleurocera clavaeformis (subspecies unciale).  We have also discovered that Pleurocera semicarinata, previously unknown further south than Kentucky, ranges through Cumberland drainages well into Tennessee.  The distributions of several hydrobioid species are also clarified and expanded – more about this in coming months.

Our complete FWGNA database, covering the drainages of The Ohio as well as Atlantic drainages from Georgia to the New York line, now contains 22,044 records documenting 107 species of freshwater gastropods, with 21 subspecies.  We have updated our overall website with a new continent-scale biogeographic analysis, dividing records into North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Ohio, and Tennessee/Cumberland subsets.  Our analysis suggests that natural selection has been more important in the evolution of freshwater pulmonates than gene flow restriction, but that gene flow restriction has been more important in the evolution of freshwater prosobranchs than natural selection.

We also announce today the publication of an updated “Synthesis v3.1,” ordering our 107 species by their incidence in our continental database and assigning fresh FWGNA incidence ranks to all.

So, visit the FWGNA web resource again, for the first time!

A stultifyingly boring review...

I heard  a lot of nice comments about my online presentation to the Charleston Natural History Society Wednesday evening.  Several of you asked if the event might be available for later viewing.

Alas, it doesn't look as though my handsome face and cheery commentary were archived anywhere.  But I have uploaded a pdf version of the powerpoint presentation I offered that evening on the FWGNA site, here:

The Freshwater Gastropods of South Carolina [pdf, 6.9 mb]

Abstract:  Founded In 1998, the Freshwater Gastropods of North America Project is the largest-scale inventory of any element of the macrobenthos ever conducted in the United States. At present the survey extends over all or part of 15 states, including the Atlantic drainages from Georgia to the New York line, Ohio drainages above the mouth of the Cumberland, and Tennessee drainages above Chattanooga. For the 113 species of freshwater snails inhabiting this vast region we have developed dichotomous keys, range maps, figures, ecological notes and an overall rank-abundance tabulation.

The first state surveyed by the FWGNA Project was South Carolina. The rivers, streams, swamps, ponds and reservoirs of The Palmetto State host a fauna of 35 freshwater gastropod species, 19 prosobranchs (bearing gills) and 16 pulmonates (bearing lungs). Almost all are tiny, brown, and obscure. None are endangered, commercially important, useful in any way, or indeed even interesting. Three are exotic invasives, and another five (apparently) domestic invasives, but of no consequence. Bring clothespins for your eyelids, folks – this one’s a real snoozer.

Freshwater Gastropods Tonight!

Here’s your chance to see history in the making!  This evening at 6:30 PM (EDT) yours truly will offer the first-ever online presentation to The Charleston Natural History (Audubon) Society, “The Freshwater Gastropods of South Carolina: A stultifyingly boring review of a justifiably obscure fauna.”  This will also be the first-ever online presentation yours truly has ever offered.  What could go wrong?

The public is cordially invited!  You’ll need to download a little bit of software from the “Go To Meeting” website onto your computer, tablet, or smartphone, here:

https://global.gotomeeting.com/install/263942469

Then at 6:30, hit this link…

https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/263942469

You can also dial in using your phone, here…

United States (Toll Free): 1 877 309 2073
United States: +1 (646) 749-3129

… And in any case, enter this access code: 263-942-469.

We look forward to seeing you all this evening!

The Freshwater Gastropods of The Ohio!

We are excited to announce the grand opening of a major new web resource, The Freshwater Gastropods of The Ohio, by Martin Kohl, Ryan Evans, Mark Pyron, Tom Watters, Kevin Cummings, Will Reeves, Jeff Bailey, Mike Whitman, and myself.  Check it out:

http://www.fwgna.org/FWGO/

Here we report the results of a comprehensive freshwater gastropod survey conducted over all waters draining into the Ohio River above the mouth of the Tennessee/Cumberland, an area of some 144,000 square miles.  Roughly 37% of the 5,250 records the team gathered were from museums, 35% from natural resource agencies, and 26% from original field collections.  We identified 70 species and subspecies of freshwater gastropods inhabiting this vast study area, providing a dichotomous key, a photo gallery, range maps and ecological notes for each.

With the addition of the Ohio fauna to the faunas of the Atlantic and Tennessee drainages previously documented, the overall coverage of the Freshwater Gastropods of North America web resource has expanded from 89 to 113 species and subspecies, inhabiting all or part of 15 states.  The main FWGNA site now features an updated “Synthesis 3.0” in which every element of this diverse and far-flung fauna is ranked and classified into quartiles by incidence, using the Gaston system we pioneered back in 2013.

The entire site has been spruced up and polished to a fine sheen.  Even the bibliography has been updated, now featuring 268 entries.  Visit us again, for the first time!

20 Years of Progress in the Museums

Editor’s Note – This essay was subsequently published as: Dillon, R.T., Jr. (2023c)  Twenty Years of Progress in the Museums.  Pp 9 – 13 in The Freshwater Gastropods of North America Volume 7, Collected in Turn One, and Other Essays.  FWGNA Project, Charleston, SC.

The first FWGNA project was the “digitization” of museum collections.  The year was 1999, and at the dawn of the worldwide web, only two national collections of freshwater gastropods were searchable online: those of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (ANSP) and the Florida State Museum (FLMNH).  So the first NSF proposal a committee of nine of us wrote – Phase I of three projected phases – was to unify the freshwater gastropod holdings of 21 North American museums into a single, online database of approximately 200,000 records.  A Phase II field survey and a Phase III monographic review were set to follow [1].

That proposal was not funded.  But progress in the national museums continued, difficult though it was for me to understand at the time.  I revisited the subject of the online availability of freshwater gastropod collections ten years later, in April of 2009 [2].  And at that point, the number of national or regional mollusk collections searchable online had grown to ten.  To quote myself directly: “I’m impressed!”

Which of those ten might be the most useful for the FWGNA Project?  Research suggests that the world is inhabited by mollusks that are not freshwater snails.  And although Class = Gastropoda is a common search criterion in almost all malacological databases, Habitat or Environment = freshwater is surprisingly rare.  So my first idea was to compare the freshwater gastropod fractions of the ten museums by searching for “Family = Physidae.”  But as of 2009, several important museum databases were not even effectively searchable by family.  So as a crude estimate of the freshwater gastropod holdings of the ten databases available online as of 2009, I executed a simple search for “Campeloma.”

My results, published on this blog 15Apr2009, showed the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ) in the lead at Campeloma = 2,456 records, followed by the FLMNH Campeloma = 1,414, then ANSP = 890, and Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) = 488.

Brand new, as of 2009, was the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), hosted at Copenhagen [2].  Many of our colleagues felt as though the GBIF was the wave of the future.  And quite a few prominent North American museums were cooperating, including the USNM, ANSP, and FLMNH.  My query of the GBIF database (executed 26May09) returned Campeloma = 3,210.

So another ten years have passed.  And as impressive as C = 3,210 most certainly is, how does that statistic compare with the online freshwater gastropod records retrievable today?  Spoiler alert!  C = 11,874.

In February of 2010 a workshop was held at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC, ultimately yielding “A Strategic Plan for Establishing a Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance” [3].  And shortly thereafter, the NSF began accepting proposals to its new “Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections Program.”  The effect has been remarkable.

Initial projects were “thematic” around the various Kingdoms and Phyla of Biology, rather reminiscent of the chromosomally-based approach pioneered by the Human Genome project.  The “Thematic Collection Network” most directly relevant to our interests here was “Invert-E-Base,” kick-started in 2014 by a consortium that included our colleagues Rudiger Bieler of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago (FMNH), Diarmaid O’Foighil of the UMMZ, and Elizabeth Shea of the Delaware Museum of Natural History (DMNH) [4]. Ultimately Invert-E-Base grew to involve 18 US museums, universities and other institutions, including many with substantial freshwater gastropod holdings, such as the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH), the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS), and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCSM).

Meanwhile, NSF also funded the “Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Program” (iDigBio) to serve as a hub for all the data being collected by the various thematic collection networks [5]. Additional contributions rolled in from all the other museums where digitization efforts had been proceeding independently, such as ANSP, USNM, FLMNH, MCZ, and so forth. 

Today the iDigBio database includes 4.3 million gastropod records held by scores of institutions worldwide, including The Canadian Museum, the British Museum, the Australian Museum, all over Europe – everywhere.  My search of the iDigBio database for Genus = Campeloma last week returned that eye-popping 11,874 figure quoted above.  And how about Family = Physidae AND Continent = North America?  Drum roll, please.  The iDigBio database boasts 31,417 records of the North American Physidae.

Here are the top-ten museums, ranked by their North American physid holdings, as I retrieved them through iDigBio last week.  The links are to their local online search facilities, if maintained, which tend to hold more current data. 

1. UMMZ 5,492
2. NMNH 5,417
3. MCZ 3,619
4. ANSP 3,415
5. FMNH 2,726
6. FLMNH 2,083
7. INHS 1,717
8. CMNH 1,051 (No local search)
9. NCSM 824
10. DMNH 653 (No local search)

Back in 2017 The American Malacological Society sponsored a symposium entitled, “The North American Mollusk Collections – A Status Report,” which subsequently yielded several excellent papers in the American Malacological Bulletin.  Here’s a tidbit I gleaned from the contribution by Sierwald and colleagues [6]:

“Of the 6.2 million cataloged lots (of mollusks), 4.5 million (73%) have undergone some form of data digitization (which includes all forms of digitization, e.g. ledger records entered, transcribed, or imported into word processor, spread sheet, or relational database formats). About 1.1 million (25%) of digitized records have been georeferenced, which represents 18% of all cataloged lots. Only 20 collections (less than 25%) claim to be fully Darwin Core compliant, however, 34 of the 66 collections with some form of digitization are searchable online through iDigBio, Arctos, or other portals, or directly through institutional websites.”

That's great, but there’s certainly still work to be done.  Prominent among those institutions not searchable online at present is the Ohio Museum of Biodiversity (OSUM) in Columbus, which boasts very significant freshwater gastropod holdings.  Our good buddy Tom Watters is gittin’ ‘er done, even as we speak.

I should conclude with a word of warning.  One of the many criticisms leveled at our FWGNA proposal way back in 1999 was simply the question of data quality.  How would we know that all those collections of freshwater snails we were proposing to digitize really were what their museum labels said they were?  Darn good question.

The reason that I have become such an avid customer of online databases over the last 20 years is that I am preparing to visit the actual collections themselves.  I print shopping lists, fasten them to an old-fashioned clipboard, and walk around the actual, physical collections, inspecting every lot personally.  Only after I have personally verified a record is it added to the FWGNA database.  One at a time.

The more powerful a tool, the more dangerous it becomes.  You  can hurt yourself with a saw, you can kill yourself with a chainsaw.  I feel sure that 100% of my readership is acutely aware that a simple Google search is simultaneously very powerful, and very dangerous, and all of us know how to use Google safely.  Exactly the same caveats pertain to the NCBI GenBank, and to the iDigBio database.  Like my Momma used to say, “You be careful with that thing now, you hear?”

Notes

[1] For more about the history of the FWGNA Project, see:

• Twenty Years of FWGNA [11July18]

[2] My 2009 museum survey was a two-parter.  See:

• Progress in the Museums [15Apr09]
• Freshwater Gastropod Databases Go Global! [26May09]

[3] A Strategic Plan for Establishing a Network Integrated Biocollections Alliance:

NIBA Brochure [pdf]

[4] Sort-of obsolete, but nevertheless interesting:

• Welcome to Invert-E-Base [html]

[5] Integrated Digitized Biocollections:

• iDigBio [html]

[6] Sierwald, P. R. Bieler, E.K. Shea and G. Rosenberg (2018) Mobilizing Mollusks: Status Update on Mollusk Collections in the U.S.A. and Canada.  American Malacological Bulletin 36(2):177-214. https://doi.org/10.4003/006.036.020

FWGNA Volumes 1 - 4 Now Available!

Extra, extra [1]!  Read all about it!  We are delighted to announce that the first formal publications of the Freshwater Gastropods of North America Project are now available for purchase from all the usual online outlets, as well from the publisher at a substantial discount.

Buy all four from the author's profile page

Volume 1, by Dillon, Ashton, Reeves, Smith, Stewart and Watson, reports the results of the largest-scale inventory of freshwater snails ever conducted in the United States. We have reviewed and synthesized macrobenthic collections taken by ten natural resource agencies, malacological holdings at eight museums, and our own original collections from hundreds of sites, covering all freshwater gastropod habitat in Atlantic drainage systems from Georgia to the New York line. For each of the 70 species and subspecies we provide:

• A dichotomous key for identification.
• Full-color figures.
• Range maps at county scale.
• Notes on habitat, ecology, life history, and reproductive biology.
• Systematic and taxonomic updates to modern standards.

We propose a new, objective system of conservation status ranking [2], and a new species of pleurocerid snail is described in the appendix [3].

Volumes 2, 3, and 4 are collections of essays, originally appearing in the present blog 2003 – 2019, now edited and rearranged thematically.  Volume 2 collects 29 essays on the systematics and evolution of the freshwater pulmonates of North America, Volume 3 comprises 37 essays on the systematics and evolution of the prosobranchs, and Volume 4 collects 38 essays reviewing ecological and biogeographical themes.  These volumes are intended to support and augment the scientific results reported in Volume 1.

The retail prices for the four individual volumes are $39.95, $34.95, $35.45, and $35.45, respectively.  Although not unreasonable for 250-page glossy color paperbacks in this day and age, I don’t mind telling you that the method by which those retail prices were determined irritated me considerably.  The figures were essentially dictated by amazon.com as the lowest possible sticker-price that would yield $1.00 for the FWGNA [4].  All the rest of the sale either goes to my publisher (Bookbaby) or to Amazon for its marketing services.

So then immediately after the volumes hit the market a couple days ago, Amazon began advertising cut-rate prices.  For Volume 1 today, the amazon.com site is listing “10 used from $34.66” and “21 new from $32.61.”  I do not understand this phenomenon at all.

Here’s the bottom line.  I would encourage you all to cut out the online retailing giants, and purchase FWGNA Volumes 1 – 4 directly from the publisher’s website.  The FWGNA Project [5] will receive a substantially larger fraction of the sale. 

And as an inducement, I have arranged with Bookbaby to sell the entire four-volume set for the discount price of $99.95.  That’s a savings of $45.85 to you, and everybody wins, except Jeff Bezos.

Follow this simple three-step process:

• Go to my Author Profile Page [here].
• Add all four titles as listed at the bottom of that page to your shopping cart.
• Apply the coupon code FWGNA4 to each volume.

The system should discount your package price from $145.80 to $99.95.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, each of the four volumes features a fairly extensive acknowledgement section.  But in addition to those lengthy lists of explicit appreciations, I do want to thank the entire readership of the FWGNA Blog for your support and help over the 20-year gestation of this project.  I have received quite a few helpful comments and suggestions from you all over the history of this forum, sometimes by direct email, other times anonymously commented.  I prefer the former, but appreciate have always appreciated all input, regardless of provenance.

Notes

[1] No, this is not an “Extra extra.”  As I understand it, an “Extra” was a second run of a daily newspaper, printed to update the readership on some breaking news.  And an “Extra extra” was a third printing.  So, blog posts aren’t printed.  And even if the present text should ultimately appear in print, which is, after all, one of the primary messages being conveyed in the blog post above, it cannot possibly be extra in any sense.  This is the first run of the blog for April of 2019.  I’m sorry, I just like the sound of “Extra, extra.”

[2] For more on the objective system of incidence ranking piloted by the FWGNA project, see:

• What is rarity? [9Dec13]
• Why is rarity? [6Jan14]

[3] For more about my newly-described species of pleurocerid snail, see last month’s post:

• Pleurocera shenandoa n.sp. [11Mar19]

[4] And no, this is not $1.00 profit.  The set-up costs for these books were a couple thousand dollars each.  There is no way that the FWGNA will ever make any actual profit [5], but profit has never been the point.

[5] And perhaps you remember, the FWGNA Project is a sole proprietorship of Rob Dillon.  So I admit that the distinction between the FWGNA and Rob Dillon is a fine one.  But important.  For more, see:

• Twenty years of FWGNA [11July18]

Twenty Years of FWGNA

Editor’s Note – This essay was subsequently published as: Dillon, R.T., Jr. (2023c)  Twenty Years of FWGNA.  Pp 1 – 7 in The Freshwater Gastropods of North America Volume 7, Collected in Turn One, and Other Essays.  FWGNA Project, Charleston, SC.

The environmental movement has ever been riven with fad and fashion, wailing and rending our garments over the crisis of today, yesterday’s forgotten and gone.  Who among us remembers the Spotted Owl?  Who remembers the National Biological Survey?  I thought not.

Bill Clinton took office in January of 1993.  And high on the radar of his new Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, was the Spotted Owl controversy, pitting the big lumber interests of the Pacific Northwest against advocates for an endangered bird.  Secretary Babbitt embraced the idea of a “National Biological Survey” as a way to prevent, or at least manage, such problems in the future [1].  Presumably, if we could identify, count, and map every plant, animal, protozoan and algal cell in The Land of the Free and The Home of the Brave, we could see this sort of problem coming.

First FWGNA flier, 1998

In retrospect, Sec. Babbitt’s idea was dead aborning [2].  Congress allocated no new funds for the agency, and the political climate turned hostile almost immediately, with the Republican landslide of November 1994.  Secretary Babbitt staffed his new National Biological Survey with existing personnel, robbed primarily from the Fish & Wildlife Service.  The agency was subsumed under the USGS as the “Biological Resources Division” in 1996 and ultimately disappeared [4].

But it was against this backdrop that the Freshwater Gastropods of North America Project was born.  To us, the time seemed ripe for a “long-term, collaborative effort to inventory and monograph all freshwater snails inhabiting the continent north of Mexico.”  And where better to inaugurate such an effort than in Washington, DC?  The first “interest group” meeting of the FWGNA Project was held July 29, 1998, on the campus of George Washington University, as the American Malacological Society hosted the first World Congress of Malacology.

The FWGNA Project was initially coordinated by a board of eight “Regional Editors”: Steve Ahlstedt, Ken Brown, Rob Dillon, Paul Johnson, Eileen Jokinen, Bob McMahon, Dave Strayer, and Shi-Kuei Wu, jointly submitting a proposal to the NSF Biotic Surveys and Inventories program in November of 1999.  That proposal was revised and resubmitted in the fall of 2000, minus Shi-Kuei Wu (who had retired), but adding Bob Hershler, Rudiger Bieler, Jean-Marc Gagnon, Rob Guralnick, and Tom Watters.  Phase 1 of our proposed FWGNA Project was designed as a survey of museum holdings, with field surveys to follow in Phase 2 and taxonomic revisions in Phase 3.  Alas, the project was not funded.

Meanwhile, completely separate and independent of all the FWGNA excitement, the Freshwater Mollusk Conservation Society was born.  I was invited to a board meeting in Chattanooga in November of 1998 to draft bylaws for the new organization and asked to serve as chairman pro tempore of the FMCS Committee on the Status & Distribution of Gastropods.  My formal election to that post occurred in March.

So that first meeting of the FMCS Gastropod Committee, held on March 19, 1999, was synonymous with the second meeting of the FWGNA Project.  And our third meeting was also synonymous with the FMCS Gastropod committee meeting of March 14, 2001, at Pittsburgh.  Discussion at both of those meetings was about evenly split between a continental survey of freshwater gastropods and a “national conservation strategy,” being spearheaded by Paul Johnson.  Dr. Johnson succeeded me as chair of the FMCS Gastropod Committee in 2003.

Meanwhile, I had been elected to the presidency of the American Malacological Society.  And the featured symposium at the 2002 AMS meeting in Charleston was “The Biology and Conservation of Freshwater Gastropods” [5], with a fourth meeting of the FWGNA Project following on the evening of August 4.

At our 2002 meeting the idea of a “new model” for the FWGNA Project was born.  The project was to be decentralized as much as possible, with regional or local surveys conducted, and local sources of funding sought.  The effort would be united by a single database, in a common format, held centrally.  But otherwise, efforts would proceed independently.

FWGNA Logo 1999 - 2004

I don’t remember when the idea of an FWGNA website first came up.  I began posting resources and archiving old email messages at cofc.edu/~dillonr in early 1999.  But our first regional website, with a photo gallery, dichotomous key, and 24 species pages featuring distribution maps and biological information, was the Freshwater Gastropods of South Carolina, which went online in February of 2004, coauthored by RTD and T. W. Stewart.

We migrated over to cofc.edu/~fwgna in September of 2006, adding an FWGNC site for the Atlantic drainages of North Carolina, with Stewart and B. T. Watson.  An FWGGA for the Atlantic drainages of Georgia (with Stewart and W. K. Reeves) followed in March of 2007.  Our FWGVA site for the Atlantic drainages of Virginia (with Stewart and Watson) was under construction as early as December of 2006 but did not formally open until June of 2008.  The format for all four of these regional sites was designed by Ms. Jasmine Wu, a college friend of my daughter’s with good technical skills and a fine eye.

In late 2009 we purchased the domain name fwgna.org and embarked on a significant design upgrade, spearheaded by my good buddy and long-suffering Web Wizard, Mr. Steve Bleezarde.  Steve also suggested that I migrate from emailing an ever-growing address book [6] monthly news bulletins to posting essays in a blog format.  The “Grand Opening” of the FWGNA Blog was on February 28, 2010.

Our FWGTN East Tennessee site (with Martin Kohl) went online in November of 2011, and our FWGMA Mid-Atlantic site (with M. J. Ashton and T. P. Smith) went up in October of 2013.

Through our first 18 years, as we were hosted by the College of Charleston, I suppose the best descriptor for the FWGNA would have been, “Lightly-funded Extramural Research Project.”  We did receive a few small grants, most notably from the U.S. National Park Service, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, and Normandeau Associates.  But our income was always far, far below our expenditures.  I’d estimate that 95% of the work has been done for love, not money.

I was banned from the campus of the College of Charleston in 2016, forced into retirement, and sued [7].  That lawsuit was settled late last year [8].  And I have now used the proceeds therefrom to establish the FWGNA Project as a sole-proprietor consultancy.

So, what does the future hold?  When field conditions are good, we have been working in the Ohio River drainages of western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and eastern Illinois.  The big team of RTD, Kevin Cummings, Ryan Evans, Mark Pyron, Tom Watters, Will Reeves, Richard Kugblenu, Jeffrey Bailey and Michael Whitman have developed a database of 5,256 freshwater gastropod records at last count, comprising 68 species and subspecies.  A 2017 PowerPoint presentation describing last spring’s 4,746-record “interim report” is downloadable from the link below.  And a draft “Freshwater Gastropods of The Ohio” website should appear online before the year is out [9].

FWGO ppt from SFS 2017

When field conditions are inclement, as they have been all over The East for months now, we have been working on the first hardcopy publications of the FWGNA Project.  A four-volume set should hit the market in the next couple months, Good Lord willing, and the creeks do rise.  Volume I, by Dillon, Ashton, Reeves, Smith, Stewart & Watson will report the scientific results of our 12,211-record freshwater gastropod survey of the Atlantic drainages, from Georgia to the New York line.  Volumes II, III, and IV will collect, reorganize, edit and update a diverse assortment of approximately 100 essays that yours truly has emailed or posted on the FWGNA blog since 2006.  You won’t want to miss any of that.

I should conclude by re-emphasizing the collaborative foundation of the FWGNA Project.  I realize that our recent evolution into a sole-proprietorship makes it look as though I, your Coordinator, am somehow angling to become Your Boss.  I have fought that perception as hard as I can for 20 years, and will continue to resist it until we all, together, cover this great wide continent of ours, Sea to Shining Sea.

Science is The Boss of the FWGNA Project.  I do, however, have a series of polite suggestions for everybody, independently, today.  Please walk out your back door, stoop down into that first little puddle, and note the remarkable freshwater gastropod fauna crawling lazily on the grass blades.  Take good data, collect if you hear the call, walk 50 yards, stoop over again, and repeat.  If you work for an agency, start a program.  If you’re a research scientist, write a proposal.  You do not now, nor have you ever been called to, clear anything with anybody, most especially me.  But again, please,

Keep in touch!

Rob

Notes

[1] Regional biological surveys have been around since natural history became a science.  And ideas for National Biological Surveys in the U.S. and Canada were being discussed in academic circles as early as the 1970s, continuing to gain momentum in the 1980s.  For more, see:

Wagner, F. H. (1999) Whatever happened to the National Biological Survey?  Bioscience 49: 219 – 222.

[2] But you’ve got to love it.  Here’s a quote from Krahe [3]:

“The NBS would parallel the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in its mission of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating scientific data without any entanglement in the regulatory and managerial responsibilities of its sister agencies. ‘What we are doing is strengthening the credibility of science, Babbitt said, by putting some distance between federal scientists and those in government who make policy and execute it.”

[3] Krahe, D. (2012) The Ill-fated NBS: A historical analysis of Bruce Babbitt’s vision to overhaul Interior Science.  Pp 160 – 165  In: Weber, Samantha (ed.) Rethinking Protected Areas in a Changing World: Proceedings of the 2011 George Wright Society Biennial Conference on Parks, Protected Areas, and Cultural Sites. Hancock, Michigan: The George Wright Society.

[4] Quoting the USGS website verbatim: “2010 – A USGS realignment established the Ecosystems Mission Area, which comprised the Fisheries, Wildlife, Status and Trends, Environments and Invasive Species Programs and the Cooperative Research Units, all former programs of the BRD.”

[5] The proceedings of the AMS2002 freshwater gastropod symposium were published in the American Malacological Bulletin, Vol 19(1/2).

[6] I did not, however, abandon my email address book, which has 264 entries at present.  Any of my readership who might wish to be added are cordially invited to email DillonR@fwgna.org.

[7] For a good review, see the August 8, 2016 issue of Inside Higher Ed: “Who Decides What Must Be on a Syllabus?” [html]

[8] Here’s a rather sweet-natured update published in the Charleston Post & Courier 26Feb18.  With video!  See “Scientist who had falling-out with College works from home.”  [html]

[9] The FWGNA Project is looking for a colleague with GIS mapping skills.  Any volunteers?