Grant to expand access to snail collection
Molly Murray
Land snails, creatures like slugs and garden snails, don't get much attention unless you accidentally step on one and really get an appreciation for that distinctive, slimy mucus.
But that's about to change, and the Delaware Museum of Natural History will play a key role in raising the profile of creatures that are a critical part of the land-based food web.
The museum is receiving a four-year, $206,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to digitize the 65,000 land snail specimens in the museum's collection. The museum is part of a larger, $2.2 million collaborative effort to digitize biological collections in the United States.
In this project, more than 2 million specimens and related data from arthropod and mollusk collections at the Delaware museum, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Auburn University, Penn State University, the University of Michigan and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History will be added to a digital database.
"With one of the top 15 mollusk collections in the United States, the Delaware Museum of Natural History is an invaluable resource to scientists around the world," said Executive Director Halsey Spruance. "This grant allows the museum to expand our reach even greater and continue the important task of making our collections available online."
The grant is part of a larger effort to make millions of records of specimen data nationwide, much of it housed in museums and other natural history collections, available to both researchers and the public. This project will speed up the digitizing process with optical character and voice-recognition technology.
"This grant will allow us to publish approximately 65,000 data records online for the first time," said Curator of Mollusks Dr. Liz Shea. "Researchers from around the world will have instant and easy access to the rich resources of the museum's mollusk collection. The benefits of this important project are far-reaching."
Among the immediate benefits are learning more about the habitat-based distribution of these animals.
Shea said that because land snails and slugs are hard to find and difficult to identify, they often go unnoticed even though they play a critical role in land-based ecosystems. Many species are plant eaters and play an important part in the food web.
"Land snails are also food for many different types of animals, including humans in some cultures," she said.
"The idea is for us to bring as many 'hidden' specimen records into the public domain so that they are accessible to as many researchers and interested public as possible," Shea said.
Two major types of animals are included in the grant: insects and mollusks. Neither have a backbone, and the families include hundreds of thousands of different species.
One benefit of the Natural History Museum collection, she said, is that it includes specimens from throughout the eastern United States and specimens collected over many different decades.
"You can use the collections to see historical data about what species lived where," she said. "Our collection is very strong in specimens collected from the 1960s to today, but once you link our collection with other collections, as we are doing with this grant, you can start to build a very robust data set from the past 150 to 200 years."
Among the treasures in the Natural History Museum collection are tree snails from Florida.
They were "collected in places that unfortunately no longer exist. But because we have both the physical specimens, the shells and the data about where and when they were collected, we use these specimens to help us understand the world around us," Shea said.
And if you still think snails and slugs are all about the slime, think again. They are related to clams, oysters, squids and octopods.
"Snails are amazing animals," Shea said. "They are found in every sort of environment – from mountaintops to the deep oceans."
Contact Molly Murray at 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj.