During the 2024 calendar year, we operated Powdermill Avian Research Center’s (PARC) bird banding station for 184 days across all four seasons, during which we banded 9,415 new birds, processed 4,581 recaptured individuals, and released 9 birds unbanded. These 14,005 birds represented 125 species, one of which was new to Powdermill’s banding dataset. 

The banding station at PARC has been running year-round since June 1961 and has accumulated over 850,000 banding records of nearly 200 species, so a new species for the station is a relatively rare event. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and spoil the surprise, which happened near the end of 2024.

At Powdermill, we band birds year-round, which is somewhat unique among banding stations. We increase our effort during the spring and fall migration seasons and band fewer days each week during the breeding season and winter. This helps us track seasonal events like arrival and departure timing of migratory species, onset of breeding activities, relative abundance of different species, site fidelity (whether individuals come back to the same breeding or wintering areas every year), and longevity. Banding year round also allows us to observe the seasonal progression of birds from familiar to fancy and back again. 

Each year, there are species or events that cause excitement among the banding crew. Some of them might be species that are uncommonly caught at Powdermill or difficult to see in the wild, some might be individuals that are earlier or later in the season than expected, some might be favorite species that we never tire of seeing, and some might be days with unusually high capture rates or big days. As each year comes to a close, we reflect on the highlights and compile a list of our favorite moments, of which 2024 had an abundance.

The first highlight of 2024 was a Red-shouldered Hawk that we caught and banded on January 24. A species that is a little too big for our songbird-size mist nets, raptors and other large birds generally bounce right out of the nets. This bird was holding on to a trammel line with its talons which gave the bander a split-second advantage. A species that seems to be expanding its range northward, Red-shouldereds can be found in southwest Pennsylvania year-round, although this is only the 6^th ever banded at Powdermill.

As winter waned and we prepared for the spring migration season, we caught an unexpectedly early Gray Catbird on March 27, setting a record for the earliest catbird banded at Powdermill (the previous earliest banding record was on April 19). Spring progressed relatively normally until May 9 when we caught Powdermill’s ninth ever Swainson’s Warbler. This is a species that has historically bred in the southeastern part of the US but was confirmed as a breeding species in Pennsylvania (at Bear Run Nature Reserve just 30 minutes south of Powdermill) for the first time in the summer of 2023. These breeding records may represent a northward range shift for this species. 

The spring migration banding season ends at Powdermill at the end of May, but we continue to band, with reduced effort, through the summer. On June 7, we caught a Tennessee Warbler, a species that migrates annually between breeding sites across much of Canada and wintering grounds in the Caribbean, Central America, and northern South America. They are commonly found at Powdermill during the migration seasons when they stop over to rest and refuel between flights. Nearly all Tennessee Warblers have moved north of us by the end of May, making our June 7 capture the second latest spring record for this species in our dataset. There was something a bit unusual about this individual: it was molting feathers that suggested that it was undergoing the post-breeding molt, something that happens before, or sometimes during, the early stages of fall migration. Although there wasn’t time for this bird to have attempted breeding, perhaps something caused this individual to turn around and head south, representing the earliest (by more than a month!) fall migrant Tennessee Warbler in our dataset. 

Summer progressed relatively normally, but the lack of rain began to become noticeable as streams became trickles and small ponds dried up. By July each year, we begin to catch birds in their post-fledging period and our capture numbers increase, but we were not expecting to have one of the biggest summer banding days in our 63-year history when we caught 153 birds on July 17. For context, we were operating about 1/3 of the nets that we run during migration and had to close the nets early due to heat, so the 153-bird day was quite impressive and our third highest summer banding total. This was the beginning of a severe drought that gripped our region through much of the second half of the year, and the ponds near PARC held some of the only locally available drinking water for breeding and migrating birds. We suspect this concentrated birds in the banding area and increased capture rate in late summer and throughout fall.

The fall migration banding season begins in August as the current year’s fledglings begin to disperse and the first migrants begin to move south. Following the trend of a higher-than-usual concentration of birds in the banding area, we had several species with above average captures and two that broke the single-day high totals. On August 16, we caught 11 Blackburnian Warblers and on September 3 we caught 35 Ruby-throated Hummingbirds. Both species breed locally, but we catch the majority of individuals during the post-breeding and fall migration season.

The second half of September and the first half of October is the busiest part of the banding year, and interesting captures came in rapid succession during that period in 2024. Soras are a species of rail, a secretive marsh bird that is usually difficult to see, and that we average fewer than one capture per year. We caught a Sora on September 21 and a second one on September 24 – these were #22 and #23 in our dataset, and only once before did we catch two in one season.

September 24 held the banding crew’s biggest highlight of the year: a Kirtland’s Warbler. Kirtland’s Warblers are one of the rarest species of wood warblers in North America – it was critically endangered with a population of about 167 pairs in the 1970s-80s. It is an Endangered Species Act success story: with habitat management and control of brood parasites, the species recovered to a healthy population of ~4,500-5,000 birds and was delisted in 2019. Although it’s not an abundant species, given its migratory route between breeding grounds in Michigan and wintering grounds in the Bahamas, we knew it was just a matter of time before one was spotted in southwest Pennsylvania. Remarkably, this was not the first Kirtland’s Warbler caught at Powdermill: one was banded on September 21, 1971 when the population was at its low point.

Over the years, a few possible Bicknell’s Thrushes were banded at Powdermill, but it wasn’t until 2023 that two were definitively identified here. They’re difficult to identify because they look very similar to Gray-cheeked Thrush, but average a bit smaller and more reddish in color. On September 27, we caught and banded another, this one noticeably reddish and falling well within Bicknell’s measurements. Gray-cheeked and Bicknell’s Thrushes were considered the same species until 1995, when there was enough evidence (based on morphology, vocalizations, habitat, and migration patterns) to elevate Bicknell’s Thrush to full species status.

Fall migration would not be complete without a fat bird highlight. During the migration seasons, migratory songbirds increase their food intake so that they can deposit fat reserves that they use as a source of energy to fuel their overnight flights. Songbirds flap their wings continuously while they fly, so they require a lot of energy to accomplish their migrations. A Swainson’s Thrush that we caught on September 27 had accumulated impressive fat deposits, weighing in at 51.4 grams. Powdermill’s dataset contains over 17,000 Swainson’s Thrushes and only three have been heavier than this bird. A fat bird is a bird that is well prepared for migration!

Old birds are interesting captures, and a Wilson’s Snipe that we caught on October 11 was just that. This individual was banded in 2019 and aged as a bird that hatched at least in 2017, if not earlier. Not only is this a notably old bird, but it had been recaptured three other times at Powdermill, providing us a peek into its life.

The fall migration banding season began to wane as October progressed, and our seasonal field techs’ last day was November 2.  But the surprises hadn’t stopped yet! In the morning, we caught an unusual Empidonax flycatcher (Empidonax is the genus of flycatchers that tend to pose identification challenges) – it was quite yellow on its underparts and the face proportions were not quite right for any of the species expected in the east. Further, an Empidonax flycatcher in southwest Pennsylvania this late in the year would be exceptionally rare. After a series of diagnostic measurements done independently by three of the banders on staff, we determined that this individual was a Western Flycatcher, a species found in the western part of the continent from the Rocky Mountains west to the Pacific Coast, and a species never before banded at Powdermill.

Later that evening, we set up nets to catch owls for Powdermill’s public Owling at the Moon event. Using audio lures, we attempted to catch Northern Saw-whet Owls and Eastern Screech-Owls. Successfully catching owls is very weather-dependent, and luck was on our side this year. Not only did we catch several individuals of our two target species, but we had a big surprise when we caught a Barred Owl, the second ever caught at Powdermill. The crew was excited to get to study this species in the hand and to share it with Owling at the Moon attendees.

It was a busy but satisfying year, full of visitors and events, bird banding workshops, and interesting birds, and we look forward to what 2025 will bring!

Annie Lindsay is the Bird Banding Program Manager at Powdermill Nature Reserve, the environmental research center of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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(De)Forested Flight: An Eagle Scout Project at Powdermill

A Year in Review: Bird Banding 2023

Hummingbird Lessons

The first day I started volunteering as a high school Sophomore, I journeyed deep into the heavy woods of the Rector area, into a small building just off a gravel road with a sign out front that read “Powdermill Avian Research Center.” The light was on in the small, cinder block banding lab, and I could see some people through my breath materializing in front of me. It was close to 5:30 in the morning, something I was unprepared for in the middle of summer vacation. That was the first of many surprises to follow that day. 

As I accompanied the adults through net routes, watching them untangle birds caught in nets as easily as a practiced Rubix solver would twist a cube, I was amazed by the colors and sounds with each new bird. Some of these birds I recognized just from looking out my window: robins, blue jays, cardinals, and sparrows all made up the cast, but then came the birds I had never seen or heard of before, like an Ovenbird or a Northern Waterthrush. 

Once we returned to the research station, the building where my day’s journey began, each of the cotton bags containing a bird were clipped to a pulley system by a multitude of colored carabiners, and one by one they emerged from their bags, held safely and securely in the bander’s grip. My job was to record the bird’s data; important marks like wing length, age, sex, weight, species, and band size all went into the program. Afterward, the banders sent the birds on their way by releasing them out of a nearby window. It was such a quick system, necessary because of how many birds the banding team would bring in each day. 

Bird banding was not at all what I expected it to be, but there was something so enlightening about waking up, going to work like a responsible adult, and getting to spend my morning being in the wonderful outdoors. As a Boy Scout I had intermediate experience with campouts and tips for using the wilderness as a support for my life, so being immersed in it for extended periods of time while also getting to volunteer for important research really opened my eyes to a bigger world. I felt responsible for contributing, and respectful of my outdoor experiences. 

Over the next few years, I continued volunteering at Powdermill Avian Research Center (PARC), finding new birds and recording new kinds of data. This focus on wildlife, the experiences, and sense of adventure nudged me slowly toward the best decision I had ever made in my time working at Powdermill: asking to provide my Eagle Scout Project, titled “(De)Forested Flight,” to PARC. (De)Forested Flight aimed to clear overgrown vegetation around the net routes and provide nesting sites for local breeding birds. 

During the summer months, the vegetation around the mist nets grows quickly, and sometimes higher than the nets, which can decrease capture rate. The banding crew maintains the habitat in the banding area so that it is consistent year after year, but timing is important: major vegetation trimming needs to happen before the birds’ breeding season to avoid the risk of destroying nests. It’s a big job and the crew needs a lot of help, so I organized a day for my BSA Troop to go to PARC and help cut vegetation in coordinated areas.

For the most impactful part of my Eagle project, I researched what cavity-nesting species breed at Powdermill and assembled 22 bird boxes for five species: Wood Ducks, Eastern Bluebirds, Eastern Screech Owls, Black-capped Chickadees, and Tree Swallows, and enlisted the help of the Troop to help hang them in appropriate habitat.

On April 15, 2025, Powdermill Nature Reserve hosted an Eagle Scout Ceremony for the completion of (De)Forested Flight. I handed out special awards to all the amazing members who attended the Ceremony, followed by an emotional speech about the incredible mentors and role models who helped shape my journey as I advanced from Scout all the way up through Eagle, my wonderful family, and my own Troop 372 for their help and devotion to my Eagle Project. Earlier that same day, the banding crew spotted an Eastern Bluebird visiting one of the nest boxes I hung up the previous summer as part of my Eagle project.

As I look back on completing my Eagle Project, I’m reminded of how important it is to get out and keep trying new things. I was extremely grateful for all the welcoming and acceptance the staff at PARC gave me, and my Eagle Project felt like a fitting way of giving back to the community I had become a part of. 

Ollie Sparks is a volunteer at Powdermill Avian Research Center and an Eagle Scout.

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March 4, 2025

I am pleased to announce Michael J. Bainbridge as the winner of the 2024 Carnegie Mineralogical Award. Established in 1987 through the generosity of The Hillman Foundation Inc., the award honors outstanding contributions in mineralogical preservation, conservation, and education.

Michael is the Assistant Curator of Mineralogy at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Over the course of his career, he has elevated the field of mineral photography, published in leading mineralogical publications, and contributed to groundbreaking works such as Minerals of the Grenville Province: New York, Ontario, and Québec.

Michael has blended art and science to preserve and showcase the beauty of minerals, inspiring collectors and researchers alike. He has immortalized some of the rarest and best-of-species minerals, and this award recognizes the many wonderful contributions he has made to mineral heritage through his lens. 

Among his achievements, Bainbridge’s mineral photography has been featured in important works, such as The Pinch Collection at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and numerous articles in Rocks and Minerals and The Mineralogical Record. His work has ensured that specimens of scientific and cultural significance are preserved and appreciated by future generations. As a co-author of Minerals of the Grenville Province, Bainbridge helped document the mineralogical heritage of one of North America’s most storied geological regions. His contributions to Mindat.org and numerous mineral symposia have further enriched the global mineralogical community.

“I love to teach, and I love to tell stories, but I think both are fueled by a desire to learn for myself,” said Michael, reflecting on his achievements. “I’ve always been technically minded but artistically inclined, so combining my passion for minerals with my love of photography has proven the perfect vehicle for me to pursue and share both the scientific and the aesthetic. It has afforded me access to some of the world’s great collections and sparked collaborations with some of the community’s most influential amateurs and professionals alike.

“Among my proudest accomplishments, the Pinch book stands in high relief. Pushing the boundaries of photomicroscopy in documenting some of the smallest and rarest specimens of Mont Saint-Hilaire has been both challenging and rewarding. Ensuring top-notch reproductions for Lithographie’s publications has proven a similarly worthy endeavor. The significant finds I have made as a field collector are also close to my heart. But seeing new people come to the hobby through doors I have helped to open—whether through the Recreational Geology Project or co-founding the new Ottawa Valley Mineral Club—has perhaps been the most rewarding of all.

“More than anything, I am grateful for the many opportunities to share what I have learned along the way. And now, I look forward to the next chapter in my career as I assist in curating Canada’s national collection at the Canadian Museum of Nature. I am truly honored and humbled by this recognition of my small part in helping to present and preserve the world’s mineralogical heritage for future generations.”

I had the honor of presenting the award to Michael at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show on February 15, 2025. Congratulations, Michael! 

2025 Carnegie Mineralogical Award

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2025 Carnegie Mineralogical Award, and the deadline is November 15, 2025. Eligible candidates include educators, private mineral enthusiasts and collectors, curators, museums, mineral clubs and societies, mineral symposiums, universities, and publications. For information, contact Travis Olds, Assistant Curator, Section of Minerals & Earth Sciences, at 412-622-6568 or oldst@carnegiemnh.org.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed in many US cities and states alongside Columbus Day, and I would like to suggest some ways to observe the holiday for those who do not claim Indigenous heritage. As the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) liaison at Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH), I have the privilege of working closely with Indigenous people and communities on the research, repatriation, and standards of care for the cultural assemblages stewarded in the collection. It is my absolute pleasure to help provide a platform for authentic voices and Indigenous ways of knowing to be brought into the narratives, policies, and protocols that shape our vision for the future of the museum. 

In a state like Pennsylvania with no habitable federally recognized Indigenous land, Native people are all too often seen as existing only in the past, but many First Nations people live, work, and play right alongside us in the Greater Pittsburgh Area and beyond. Indigenous Peoples’ Day should not be a memorial, but a recognition of the important history and cultural heritage of those who are the past, present, and future caretakers of this land.  

Photo by: John E Rodgers/Ogahpah Communications 

Likewise, museum exhibits should reflect the present and future of Indigenous people, not only the past. The first iteration of a new exhibit series in the Alcoa Foundation Hall of American Indians opens on October 13 to commemorate repatriation work with the Quapaw Nation. Co-curators Betty Gaedtke and Carrie Vee Wilson worked together to bring their first-person stories to this new showcase that they have chosen to call Keeping Traditions Alive. Visiting the exhibit or one in your area is an excellent way to honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  

Here are some more ways to respectfully celebrate on October 14, 2024.  

Learn About the People Who Have Called Pittsburgh Home 

Many different cultural groups have occupied the Upper Ohio River Valley including but not limited to the Delaware/Lenape, the Haudenosaunee, the Shawnee, and the Wyandotte. The Osage Nation also claims origin in the Ohio River Valley, and you can learn about all these nations on their official websites. I also suggest hitting up your local library to check out books on these groups as well as the cultural traditions and ancestors who came before them. This region was home to those who are often referred to as the Adena, Hopewell, and Monongahela. But keep in mind, we have no idea what they called themselves.  

Here are some resources: 

Haudenosaunee Confederacy 

Delaware Tribe 

Absentee Shawnee Tribe

Wyandotte Nation 

The Osage Nation 

Educate Yourself About Indigenous History in Pennsylvania 

Many First Pennsylvanians were forced from their homelands and infected with unfamiliar diseases by colonizers. Later the first assimilation school was created in Carlisle, PA and used as a model for 24 more of these institutions whose primary goal was to force Indigenous children to abandon their Native languages and customs. In the 1960s, the building of the Kinzua Dam forced Seneca Nation citizens to move into the State of New York, breaking the 1794 Treaty of Peace and Friendship. Indigenous communities thrive despite these events and institutions, but it is important to recognize and not try to hide these gruesome parts of our shared American history. You can find more information about these examples on these websites:  

Kinzua Dam – Seneca Iroquois National Museum 

Removal History of the Delaware Tribe 

Indian Boarding Schools’ Traumatic Legacy, And The Fight To Get Native Ancestors Back 

Support Local Indigenous Groups  

The Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center (COTRAIC) is a regional intertribal nonprofit that promotes the socio-economic development of the Native American community and others who experience the same type of economic difficulties in the Greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area. One way to support them is to plan to attend their annual Pow Wow that is held in Dorseyville, just outside of Pittsburgh, in late September. Learn more about their Early Childhood Education, Native American Elders, Veterans, and Employment programs at COTRAIC.org and on their Facebook page.  

COTRAIC’s Singing Winds Food Pantry is an excellent resource to help people meet their food needs.  Learn more, donate, or sign up to receive support from the food pantry.

Honor the Land

Planting Native Pennsylvanian plants is a wonderful way to honor our connection to the Earth and to provide food and shelter for the diverse species who live here. You can learn about how Indigenous People use trees, ferns, flowers, vegetables, fruits, and grasses to enhance their quality of life. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania offer suggestions for those who are interested. 

Support Indigenous Artists, Authors, Film Makers, and Musicians

You have so many options! The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation released a list of Indigenous musical artists to watch out for in 2024. My personal favorite this year is Sekawnee. Check out their video for the song “Nations” with frequent collaborators, Chasé Scanz and EfrainYB.  

Check out the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program that champions Indigenous-created stories in a global scale. 

The New York Public Library posted a wonderful resource for finding recent works by Indigenous authors. 

You can also support Indigenous artists by purchasing art through the online gift shop of the Seneca Iroquois National Museum/Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center or take a drive up to purchase something in person and see the new longhouse that they’ve built behind the museum.    

Help Change Derogatory Mascots and Place Names

Sign petitions, attend community forums, and advocate for the changing of harmful stereotypes and offensive signage in our community. From the Cleveland Guardians to Hemlock Hollow Road, there are many instances of this happening around us.The Haudenosaunee Nationals Lacrosse Team, who hope to make it to the 2028 Olympics, changed their name in 2022 to reflect their collective identity. 

Consider Donating Time or Resources

The Seneca Iroquois National Museum/ Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center is only a few hours’ drive from Pittsburgh and occasionally may be looking for volunteers. Check their website and follow their Instagram and Facebook accounts for more information. 

 If you are able, here are just a few organizations who can use your help. 

Advancing Indigenous People in STEM 

Native American Agriculture Fund 

NDN Collective 

Association of American Indian Affairs 

So, join me once again in celebrating the cultural diversity of Indigenous People throughout the history of our region. Remember that the best places to start educating yourself are local libraries and museums here in Pittsburgh or wherever you live.  

Amy L. Covell-Murthy (she/her) is the Archaeology Collection Manager/Head of the Section of Anthropology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. 

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For centuries, naturalists have collected the living world with the primary goal of understanding the diversity and complexity of our planet. In vast shelves and cabinets located in natural history museums, we find a diversity of specimens used daily by researchers, students, naturalists, and conservationists from around the world. These collections are not just archives of the past, but they also play a crucial role in addressing present-day challenges. By documenting the diversity of life, natural history collections provide a wealth of information that can be used to tackle issues such as climate change, pandemics, pathogen dispersals, deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity loss. They can be considered the world’s most comprehensive and complex library, serving as a valuable resource for understanding and addressing the health of our planet. 

Each specimen can be seen as a unique document or book recording an aspect of life on Earth at a particular time and place. They testify to the existence of a given species in a given locality and at a particular time, and they have a fundamental role as a guarantee of the scientific method: they allow objective observation that can be replicable. Natural history collections are an unparalleled source of information. For instance, a single bird or reptile specimen can provide data on its species, its habitat, its diet, and even its health. This wealth of information continues to allow researchers to understand better the past, the present, and the future of biodiversity, as well as the health of our planet – from local communities to the entire Earth.  

These collections are usually housed in natural history museums. These museums are research, conservation, education, and public outreach hubs. Their collections are not limited to public exhibitions; in fact, the majority are housed in storage locations, generally out of sight and knowledge of the public. The process of collecting and storing these specimens is methodical. Each specimen is carefully collected, identified, and cataloged, then stored in a controlled environment to ensure long-term preservation. This process ensures that these specimens, often fragile and irreplaceable, are protected and can continue to be used for research and education for future generations.  

Natural History Collections: a Tool to Face Global Changes 

How can a specimen collected more than 100 years ago still be relevant today? Historical collections, like the one housed at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, provide baseline data points. These initial measurements or observations serve as a starting point for future comparisons. By providing a snapshot of life on Earth at a particular time and place, these specimens allow us to study change over time. The first and most crucial step is to gather those baseline data points!  

From their early days, natural history collections’ primary goal was to inventory all life on Earth. However, with new cutting-edge technology, researchers can recover different data from historical specimens, data that the original collector didn’t even imagine. For example, when birds were collected from the U.S. Rust Belt, collectors didn’t realize that the specimens would be used to infer information about the history of pollution. Similarly, in the early twentieth century, the collectors of salamanders in the Appalachian woods didn’t even realize that some of those specimens were already infected with a pathogen that is devastating some of the world amphibian populations today.  

However, because specimens were collected, we can now map the expansion of this pathogen through time or trace the amount of black carbon in the air over time through birds’ feathers to help fight and understand climate change. Part of the job of Collection Managers like us is not just to preserve and maintain the existing collections, but also to anticipate and predict the questions future researchers will be asking. This proactive approach ensures we gather today’s data to answer tomorrow’s questions. Specimens collected over a century ago are actively used today to answer questions about current and future environmental changes.  

New applications of technologies, such as computed tomography (CT) scans, provide novel insights and usages for specimens. CT scans allow a complete 3D model of a specimen, including access to its internal morphology without damaging it. Using next-generation sequencing, scientists can use fragmented and degraded DNA for advanced analyses such as phylogenetic and phylogeographic analysis. These specialized methods allow us to study species’ evolutionary relationships and geographic distribution. These advanced techniques are just some of the ways natural history collections are being used to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge.  

A Biodiversity Backup 

Continuing to grow our collections is not only scientifically essential but undeniably needed. Currently, 1.8 million species have been formally described to science, although worldwide experts predict that around 8.75 million species still await to be discovered, described, and named. Given current extinction rates, we are racing against time to describe the remaining 86% of the world’s species, many of which may become extinct before we know they even existed! 

New species of birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and insects continue to be discovered worldwide, sometimes based on specimens tucked away in a museum for decades! These collections are not just archives of the past but also living libraries that continue to grow and evolve as new species are discovered. Each new discovery adds to our understanding of the natural world and underscores the importance of these collections in documenting and preserving Earth’s biodiversity. These new specimens contribute to our most significant and longest dataset of the natural world. But just as a library that stops acquiring new books, a natural history collection that doesn’t add new specimens will eventually lose its scientific value and relevancy. If we don’t continue to add physical proof of today’s biodiversity, we create unfillable gaps in one of our most powerful natural history data sets. Today is tomorrow’s past, and natural history collections act as a biodiversity backup of our planet!  

Serina Brady is Collection Manager of Birds and Mariana Marques is Collection Manager of Amphibians and Reptiles at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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In the tenth edition of the “Systema Naturae” (1758), the Swedish botanist and natural historian Carl Linnaeus recognized eight orders of mammals, all of which include species that today are not particularly closely related. His order Bestiae included pigs, armadillos, hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and opossums. Of these, the hedgehogs, moles, and shrews are considered today to form a natural group, with the others coming from very far-flung branches of the mammal tree of life.  

For the shrews, Linnaeus named three species of Sorex, Sorex araneus, Sorex cristatus, and Sorex aquaticus, with their habitats Europe, Pennsylvania, and America, respectively. Sorex araneus is recognized today as the common shrew (see image), distributed in Great Britain, much of the European continent, and far into Russia. However, the other two are not shrews, but are moles! Today, we recognize these as the star-nosed mole, Condylura cristata, and the Eastern mole, Scalopus aquaticus (see image). The former has a broad distribution in Pennsylvania with the latter only in the eastern part of the state. 

Just before the shrews in the tenth edition, Linnaeus named two species of moles, Talpa europaea and Talpa asiatica, with their habitats Europe and Siberia, respectively. Given the remarkable similarity in body form between the Old World and New World moles, it is surprising that Linnaeus did not recognize these four species (Sorex cristatus, Sorex aquaticus, Talpa europaea, and Talpa asiatica) as closely related.  

Regarding the Eastern mole, subsequent nineteenth century authors realized Sorex aquaticus did not belong in the shrew genus Sorex. However, it was bounced around between several mole genera, including Talpa, and it was not until 1905 that the Latin binomial we use today, Scalopus aquaticus, was first used, 147 years after Linnaeus! The formal naming of species is not static, but evolves over time as we discover more about our natural world that causes us to reconsider and reevaluate past practices. Changing the shrew aspect of the common name lagged behind the formal one, as it was not for quite some time that the shrew moniker imparted by Linnaeus disappeared. A halfway point is in the famous 1846 “The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America” by John J. Audubon and Reverend John Bachman, where they called it the common American shrew mole.  

From the short text in the “Systema Naturae” where Linnaeus named Sorex aquaticus, his motivation for identifying the Eastern mole as a shrew is unclear. Equally or perhaps more enigmatic is his motivation for using the specific name aquaticus. A direct translation of Sorex aquaticus is “water shrew,” with the strong implication that this mammal lived in the water or at least spent considerable time in the water. However, Linnaeus did not travel to America and so never saw Sorex aquaticus in the wild. The Eastern mole is a fossorial (burrowing) animal that spends most of its life underground with enormous forepaws for digging. Skin covers its tiny eyes, although it does perceive light and dark, and it lacks an external ear. Maybe its enlarged forepaws were viewed as flipper-like by Linnaeus. Yet, these paws resemble those of the Old World Talpa named by Linnaeus as true moles. In 1936, mammalogist A.V. Arlton stated, “The term “aquaticus,” as applied to our common species refers to the webbed hind feet, which indicated to some early writers a possible use in swimming” (Journal of Mammalogy, 17, p. 355). Unfortunately, Arlton did not name names for these early writers! Consequently, his statement cannot be fact checked. The bottom line is that in his description of Sorex aquaticus, Linnaeus did not mention webbing for either the fore- or hind feet. And ultimately, as the namer of the species, it is Linnaeus’ motivation that we need to know.  

There are some general rules for naming new species. For example, you can’t name a new species after yourself. In the Linnean era, the general trend was to apply Latin or Greek descriptors that would capture some aspect of the organism in question, a tradition continued today by most authors. For instance, our species, Homo sapiens, was named by Linnaeus and it translates to “wise man.” While we might debate the appropriateness of that as the binomial for our species, there is no debate that Sorex aquaticus is inappropriate for our ground dwelling Eastern mole. 

John Wible is Curator of Mammals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Star-Nosed Mole: The Nose That “Sees”

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Imagine you’re a clam, hanging out in your cozy little hole under shallow ocean water, with your siphon out, just filtering lunch out of the water current, happy as a…you. Then, all of a sudden, something flips you gently out of that hole.

You pull in your siphon and your foot, clamp shut your valves. You’re pretty tough to get open, strong adductor muscles keep your two shells held tightly together, and you’ve survived danger by closing up shop and waiting before. And nothing seems to be trying to pry you open, even though something has wrapped itself around you, and is now pulling you down into the sand with it. Then:

scrape scrape scrape

scrape scrape scrape

scrape scrape scrape

Or imagine you’re a young moon snail, Neverita duplicata – one of the most common species of moon snails that live on the eastern seaboard of North America. You’re a gastropod with a lovely round grayish shell, such that people call it a “shark eye,” and you’ve got a huge foot that can come out of that shell and cover almost all of your body – or all of your prey’s body!  But at the moment you’re just cruising along the sand, slurping at a bit of detritus. Suddenly, you’re enveloped by something. You instinctively pull your body into your shell and tightly close your door-like operculum for safety. Then your aperture is covered by…something familiar?  Then:

scrape scrape scrape

scrape scrape scrape

scrape scrape scrape

It doesn’t matter how tightly the clam clamps, or how mighty the young snail’s foot, both are going to come to the same fate, slowly. 

scrape scrape scrape

scrape scrape scrape

scrape scrape scrape

Eventually, your shell is penetrated. A rasping radula – a mollusk’s organ containing its teeth – has bored a hole through your shell with the help of a gentle acid secreted by a gland by the mouth, and then you feel a burning: gastric juices are being pumped through the hole to begin to digest your flesh. Your killer begins to slurp you up, right where you lie, wrapped up in their hug, as you’re slowly eaten alive.

The young moon snail might have figured out who its killer was before the end: that’s how it eats too. The thing is, moon snails are cannibals, the larger preying on the smaller.

There are hundreds of kinds of moon snails all over the world, but the ones that are probably most familiar to beach goers on the eastern coast of the USA are two species also commonly called “shark eyes” – Neverita duplicata and Euspira heros. From the top, they’re hard to tell apart (the spire on E. heros is a little pointier than on N. duplicata) but once you flip them over, it becomes easy to distinguish them: N. duplicata, the Atlantic moon snail, has a big callus over its umbilicus, and E. heros, the Northern moon snail, doesn’t.  Technically, only the Atlantic moon snail has a shark eye shell, but since they’re often mixed up with Northern moon snails, the term shark eye is sometimes applied to them too. 

These two moon snails aren’t the only marine gastropods that drill their prey and digest them alive to suck them up for dinner – lots of marine gastropods are predatory drills. But moon snails have distinct boreholes that allow people to identify when a shell has been bored specifically by a moon snail – scientists can even tell the difference between the Atlantic and Northern species’ holes. These “countersunk” holes look like little funnels, wider on the outside of the shell than on the inside. Other kinds of drilling snails leave behind straight-sided holes.

These unique boreholes allow scientists to track the evolution of moon snails from the Miocene to recent times. One group of researchers found that moon snail cannibalism might have driven a kind of coevolution between and among moon snail species. Because one moon snail can make dangerous prey for a fellow moon snail predator, over time moon snails seem to have learned to drill other moon snails at a spot on their shells that allowed the predator to cover the prey’s entire aperture, preventing the strong foot of their prey from fighting back. This means boring through a thicker part of the shell, however, so it takes longer to hold down and bore through the prey snail’s shell. But the record of natural selection in fossils throughout time suggests the added cost must be worth the benefit of moving target drilling zones. Meanwhile, small moon snails almost always lose out to larger ones when attacked, so both N. duplicata and E. heros have evolved to get bigger and bigger over time – although a bigger snail is also a more enticing snack target. Same-sized moon snails don’t even bother to attack one another, suggesting that a fellow moon snail is just too dangerous a prey when the winner of the battle between snails is a toss-up. As evidence that these are often battles between predator and prey snails, there are many incomplete boreholes found – a moon snail started attacking another moon snail, but only managed to get the job halfway done before the prey moon snail escaped. [1]

To be fair, moon snails aren’t just vicious cannibals – they also enjoy the snail equivalent of a nice salad. Another study that analyzed the tissues of moon snails revealed that their bodies have the chemical signatures of omnivores. The technique is called stable isotope analysis, wherein scientists use the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in an animal’s body to determine its diet, in broad terms. Carbon exists in three isotope forms, meaning the number of protons is the same in all three atoms, but the number of neutrons is different in each (carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14); Nitrogen also has three isotope forms, nitrogen-14, nitrogen-15, and nitrogen-16. The vast majority of carbon on Earth is carbon-12, which is a stable isotope, as is carbon-13, meaning they do not decay over time; nitrogen-14 and -15 are stable, and make up the vast majority of nitrogen atoms. Different plants and animals have different ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes. The ratios of isotopes in plants and animals differ and these differences transfer to the body of the consumer, and so the isotope ratios of a meat-eating animal will differ from those of a vegetarian animal, and an omnivorous animal will be different again. Scientists were surprised to find that wild moon snail isotopes suggested they also ate non-animals, so to check their findings they fed captive moon snails nothing but clams, and then tested their isotopes – which looked exactly as one would expect in an all-meat diet. Apparently the wild moon snails were actually eating things other than meat, probably algae. This was a big deal, since so much of the literature on moon snails is about their predatory drilling! [2]

Moon snail shells are a relatively common find on east-coast beaches (and another moon snail, Euspira lewisii, is a common find on the west coast), but if you’re at the beach this summer, there’s more to look for than just shells – moon snails also leave behind very distinctive egg nests, often called “sand collars.” The fertilized female snail nestles into a little hole in the sand (as all moon snails do during the day when they’re not feeding) and produces a sheet of mucus, which she mixes with sand and pushes up to the surface, as she does so, the sheet curls around her shell and eventually right around to form a ring. This fusion of mucus and sand grains solidifies, she attaches her thousands of eggs to it, and then covers those with another layer of mucus and sand. Once the eggs are ready to hatch after a few weeks, when the next high tide comes along the eggs let go thousands of little larvae called veligers, which will drift off to finish developing into baby snails who will eventually settle into the intertidal zone and start lives for themselves. Once the eggs hatch, the collar becomes brittle and disintegrates, but if you find one that’s still plastic-y on the beach, leave it! There are thousands of tiny baby vicious predators in there waiting to hatch! Awww.

Sabrina Spiher Robinson is Collection Assistant for the Section of Mollusks and Tim Pearce is Head of the Section of Mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

References

[1] Gregory P. Dietl and Richard R. Alexander, Post-Miocene Shift in Stereotypic Naticid Predation on Confamilial Prey from the Mid-Atlantic Shelf: Coevolution with Dangerous Prey PALAIOS Vol. 15, No. 5 (Oct., 2000), pp. 414-429

[2] Casey MM, Fall LM and Dietl GP, You Are What You Eat: Stable Isotopic Evidence Indicates That the Naticid Gastropod Neverita duplicata Is an Omnivore. Front. Ecol. Evol. 4:125. (2016) doi: 10.3389/fevo.2016.00125

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The Busyconidae Whelks, Homebodies of the East Coast

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We try not to have strong favorites among the mollusks of the world in the CMNH Section of Mollusks, but it’s hard not to love the whelks. They leave behind big, beautiful shells for shell collectors on our east coast and Gulf beaches; they’re instantly recognizable as a family— Busyconidae — and pretty easy to tell apart at the species level by an amateur. Some of the species are sinistral, left-coiling snails, which are otherwise rare among gastropods. They live long and move slowly, reminding us all that slow and steady is an optimal way to approach life.  They taste good! The traditional Italian American dish scungilli is often described as “conch,” but conchs only live in our warm southern waters, and what is usually sold in American markets for scungilli is actually whelk meat. (In Italy, they also eat sea snails, under a lot of different names, but the Mediterranean has different families of marine gastropods.)

Now, whelks are maybe not the most sophisticated of marine snails: unlike some gastropods with eye stalks and relatively good sight abilities, whelks have eye spots, which don’t do much more than detect light and dark. Studies of their sense of smell reveal them to have a tenuous ability at best to follow scent trails of prey in the water, and they’ve been observed just kind of slowly zig-zagging back and forth in the mud, apparently hoping to run into a clam. Once they find a clam, some whelks wedge the edge of their own shell between the valves of their prey, and just pry for as long as it takes to pop it open. Other species of whelk rock the edge of their own shells back and forth against the opening of a bivalve, slowly chipping its valves apart. 

I mean, look: it isn’t much, but it’s honest work. Whelks are just a great family of sea snails. And Busycon whelks are endemic to the east coast of North America, meaning they’ve only ever been found here. Hometown heroes, if you will.

Our east coast whelks are committed homebodies partly because they evolved relatively late among mollusk families, in the Oligocene, a period spanning from 33.9 – 23 million years ago.  The family Busyconidae first emerged in the fossil record in the Mississippian Sea, which had been a shallow extension of what is now the Gulf of Mexico that reached far inland along the route of what is now the Mississippi River. At the end of the Oligocene, the planet’s climate cooled and as ice formed at the poles, sea levels fell, eliminating this inland sea in North America — the whelks then found themselves in the Gulf.

Mollusks have existed on Earth clear back to the Cambrian Era, 540 million years ago. Most modern marine gastropod families began evolving earlier than the Busycons, which meant they were around when all the continents on Earth were one giant supercontinent called Pangea. But Pangea had already broken apart before the Busycons appeared in the fossil record.

Now, here’s the thing, if you are a marine gastropod only suited to shallow, intertidal waters, and you come into being along the coast of a supercontinent, given enough time, your family can spread around the entire coastline of that supercontinent. Then, as it begins to break up, your populations break up with it, and in a few dozen millions of years, your family has populations all over the Earth. But if you are a marine gastropod only suited to shallow, intertidal waters, and you come into being when the North Atlantic has already split from Europe, your family can’t make it across the open sea to go anywhere else. And so, the Busycon family of whelks found themselves in the Gulf of Mexico, near the shore, and began to spread from there, east and west, south and north, until today they exist from the Yucatan Peninsula up to about Cape Cod (it gets too cold for them further north).

Buccinidae whelks, however, can handle arctic cold. They first evolved in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, and they eventually spread along the coastlines across the Bering Strait and down onto the North American west coast, across the Canadian Arctic to the North American east coast and the European eastern Atlantic. They’ve actually made it almost everywhere! But Buyscons can’t take that kind of cold.

There are other factors that limit their spread, one is the ocean currents around the Gulf and western Atlantic. Although Cuba is just 90 miles from the Florida Keys, whelks, which are plentiful in Florida, have never managed to cross the Gulf Stream to colonize Cuba. But one of the main things that keep Busycon whelks from getting anywhere is that, unlike most marine mollusks, they never have a free-swimming larval form, in which they could disperse more widely on ocean currents. Most marine snails have a life cycle that starts with an egg and then proceeds after hatching to a free-swimming larva. Basically, most baby marine mollusks are plankton. And in this state, they can float around and sometimes disperse pretty far afield on ocean currents. As long as they end up in suitable habitat when it’s time for them to metamorphosize into their adult forms, marine mollusks can theoretically end up living hundreds of miles from where they were spawned.

But whelks don’t have this free-swimming period in their youth. Adult females are inseminated directly by males and then lay strings of egg cases (which are also reliably common finds on our eastern beaches) in which the little baby whelks grow and hatch as fully formed miniature snails. Then they just crawl off.

And they’re not very fast crawlers, even for snails. Whelks make their living by eating bivalves, but they’re never in a hurry to find them — in multiple observational studies over many decades, no one has ever seen a Busycon whelk move further than 150 meters in a day, and those go-getters were the outliers; many days whelks barely move at all. Many factors conspire to keep whelks close to their birthplace.

Whelk populations are so localized that some researchers think it’s important to identify and treat separately groups of whelks in distinct geographic locations not at all far from each other. In 2022, several scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) published a paper on channeled whelks (Busycotypus canaliculatus) documenting their genetic diversity in different geographic locations. They did this as part of a study of the channeled whelk population in general, to recommend how to manage the whelk fishery. (Whelks are increasingly harvested and sold as “conch” – and sometimes as clam strips!) In America, individual states manage their own fisheries of all kinds, but this isn’t always done well. In order to keep the fishing of any species (fish, mollusk, crab, shrimp, what have you) productive and sustainable, it’s important not to take more from the sea than can be replenished, and not to take animals that haven’t lived long enough to have reproduced (which is why some fisheries have size limits, as a proxy for the age and sexual maturity of the animal being harvested). But without good data on population size as well as age and size at sexual maturity, effective management and limit setting is basically impossible, and too often states don’t err on the side of caution. When allowable takes are too large, or allowed to include juvenile animals, the population of the fishery will plummet, and this has happened in different places and different times among the whelks. So, the VIMS project was meant to contribute data to help manage the whelk fisheries along the east coast sustainably.

The VIMS scientists caught whelks in ten different locations, from Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts down to Charleston, South Carolina, and sequenced their DNA. They found significant genetic divergence between the three sampled populations from the Carolinas and the populations in Virginia and north. But the scientists also found pretty big divergences across all the locations, even in populations as geographically close to one another as Virginia Beach, VA, and the Virginia Eastern Shore, about a hundred miles away across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

Morphologically, all these whelks look pretty much alike, but genetically, they’re very isolated and distinct populations, with very little breeding among locations. Busycon whelks stay so close to home that each of their little geographically specific populations genetically diverge from one another since they never get far enough to meet and mate with whelks in other relatively close locations. The VIMS authors suggested that different whelk populations in different places might require different fishery management based on size at age of maturity, which seemed to change across genetically different populations. And so, it isn’t as simple as managing the “whelk fisheries on the east coast,” or even the “whelk fisheries in Virginia.” Because Channeled whelk populations are so isolated from one another, they might need to be managed as fisheries in Charleston, SC and Ocean City, MD, and so forth, specifically.  [1]

After all that, I should tell you, though, that there is one exception to this east coast endemic story: at some point about a hundred years ago, a population of channeled whelks was introduced to San Francisco Bay. They’ve been prospering there ever since, but they can’t spread any further on the west coast because the water outside the bay is too cold for them.  That’s an extremely genetically isolated population, in an unusual environment for Busycon whelks – maybe someday it might become distinct enough from its east coast forebears to become its own species?

[1] Askin, Samantha E.; Fisher, Robert A.; Biesack, Ellen E.; Robins, Rick; and McDowell, Jan, Population Genetic Structure in Channeled Whelk Busycotypus canaliculatus along the U.S. Atlantic Coast (2022). Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. DOI: 10.1002/tafs.10374

Sabrina Spiher Robinson is Collection Assistant for the Section of Mollusks and Tim Pearce is Head of the Section of Mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Have you ever gazed up at the sky and noticed a cloud that looks like a face, or an animal, or an object? You can apply the same concept when you visit Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems! Many minerals on display have nicknames because of how they resemble certain animals, objects, or even characters from movies or TV shows. As you walk through the exhibits, let your imagination wander and search for minerals that look like things. Here are some to get you started.

As you enter Hillman Hall, check out the minerals in the Entrance Cube, their nicknames are on the labels. There are many more minerals on display throughout the hall that have acquired nicknames. Here’s just a handful of other nicknames for minerals in the exhibits, see if you can find them. Good luck and enjoy your mineral gazing!

Debra Wilson is Collection Manager for the Section of Minerals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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The title of this post, “Life Lessons from Dead Birds,” is a phrase I use to summarize my long career as an educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. For more than 38 years I managed what is now called the Learning Collection, an enormous assemblage of artifacts, rocks, minerals, fossils, and preserved plants and animals, all dedicated to regional educational use through loans to teachers and other educators. The bird-focus of the summary phrase reflects both the numerous avian materials in the Learning Collection and my preference to use some of those items whenever I had the opportunity to work with students. 

There was reasoning behind my bird bias. For natural history topics as narrowly focused as physical feeding adaptations, and as wide ranging as energy flow through ecosystems, bird examples provided students, elementary, middle, or high school level, with the chance to make their own topically relevant observations using common bird species around their school grounds, neighborhoods, and homes. My earliest presentations, however, taught me how important it was to address questions from the audience about the unique instructional materials. 

The students’ questions never seemed like accusations. Whether the setting was a classroom, an auditorium, or a park pavilion, when I stood before them bearing the preserved remains of a once living bird, they simply wanted to know about my connection to the creature’s death. My denials varied with the specimen in-hand. For the spread wing of a hawk, or the skull of an owl, touchable objects that require occasional replacement because of wear from repeated examinations, I’d explain the specimen’s provenance as salvaged material from road-killed or window-killed wildlife.  

“Birds and other wildlife have accidents, and sometimes already dead animals are donated to the museum. Permits and regulations are involved, and as a museum educator, my role in the process is to store the bodies in a freezer until they can be prepared for educational purposes.” 

When presentations involved life-like, full body taxidermy mounts, I was able to cite far longer periods of personal separation. These birds are encased in portable display boxes with clear acrylic sides, and when I held them up, I drew the students’ attention to the creature’s pose.  

“This bird appears ready to feed or to fly, and it’s been holding that position since long before I began working at the museum. I don’t know how it died, but I can share some information about how it has been preserved.” A gory summary followed, compressing into a few sentences, hours of meticulous work with scalpels, wire, pins, and a bird skin with every feather still attached to its outer surface. “The feathers are real, and the beak, along with some skull bones and leg bones, are still in place. All the body parts that would decay were removed long ago – the eyes, the brain, every internal organ, the muscle tissues. The eyes were replaced with glass replicas, of the proper size, shape, and color, and the skin, with feathers in place, was fitted over a custom-made form shaped just like the bird’s body.” 

On some occasions, exploration of a presentation’s main topic was even further delayed because student inquiries shifted from the circumstances behind the authentic wildlife materials to their very purpose. “Why use animal remains at all?” I recall a student once asking.  

My attempts to answer such questions came to include a quote from the late Dr. John E. Rawlins, former Curator of the museum’s Section of Invertebrate Zoology, about the critically important reasons for scientific collections to be created, maintained, and expanded. “Specimens are similar to books in libraries, because they are volumes of information that may be re-examined and reaffirmed,” Dr. Rawlins wrote, “But specimens are much more informative than books, because the content of a book is acquired in full by a single type of observation, reading. By contrast, the information content of a specimen is acquired by diverse methods of observation, many of which have not been applied to most specimens, and some of which have not yet been devised or even dreamed of.” 

In advocating for the use of similar materials as educational tools, I expressed my hope that their current encounter with selected bird specimens might spark interest in, and even build empathy for, the populations of various wild bird species. As an example of this process, I cited personal experience. Before working at the museum, I was a Volunteer Naturalist at Beechwood Farms Nature Reserve, the headquarters for the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania. My first encounter with a bird study skin (the rigid, cotton-stuffed, and eyeless form traditional in scientific collections) occurred during a training session there, when a Pied-billed Grebe specimen was the focus of a presentation. As the study skin was carefully passed among the dozen participants, we were encouraged to examine the bird’s lobed toes, a physical feature that provided hints about the creature’s aquatic lifestyle. 

On sections of the lower Allegheny, I had observed single Pied-billed Grebes at least a dozen times during winter months, floating placidly just off sections of wooded riverbank, and making regular, 30-second dives beneath the surface. When the study skin reached me, I dutifully examined its toes, but I also used an index finger to gently part the dense pale breast feathers to reveal a layer of much denser gray down beneath them. In that moment, the specimen provided information, different than a photograph or written account, about how the birds I observed on the icy Allegheny stayed warm. This tactile specimen-centered encounter convinced me that preserved bird remains can enhance observations of the species’ more numerous living kin. During the years I managed the Learning Collection this was among the most important concepts I promoted. 

Pat McShea is an Educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Every spring people all over the world join in the City Nature Challenge, a global effort to safely document and identify nature through the free and easy-to-use iNaturalist app. For the seventh consecutive year, Carnegie Museum of Natural History staff were among the participants taking on the challenge in and around the Pittsburgh region – and in 2024, the results were record-breaking! Totals for regional participants, identifiers, observations, and number of species hit their highest in the history of the challenge, thanks to a combination of warm, dry spring weather and dedication from participants. Observations and identifications made during the challenge are shared with scientists around the world, helping to both document and better understand the diversity of species around us.

Here are the totals from the Pittsburgh Region City Nature Challenge 2024 (CNC) – which are all records for this region’s participation! 

Total participants who made observations: 643

Total participants who made identifications: 562

Total observations made: 10,050

Total species identified: 1,753

Total identifications: 16,875

Plants topped the list for observed species, with about 46% of the total, followed by insects with about 27% of the total. Other species identified but in smaller totals include fungi, birds, arachnids, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and mollusks. 

Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) took the top spot overall. This native plant species sprouts early in spring with long stems and umbrella-like leaves. The rest of the top 10 species are all plants, with the exception of the Red Admiral (Vanessa Atalanta), a beautiful butterfly with red bands on the wings. The most observed bird, the American Robin (Turdus migratorius),took spot 17, and at spot 26, the White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) was the most observed mammal. 

With plants claiming nine of the top ten spots, it’s fitting to get perspective from the museum’s Section of Botany, who not only participate, but whose dedication puts them at the top of the list. Although they are literally professionals at looking for plants, the common message from the Botany staff is that anyone can do this challenge! The objective is to document nature all around us, from parks to neighborhood streets to city blocks and beyond. 

Reflections from the Section of Botany Scientists

Curatorial Assistant Alyssa Landa made a point to visit similar spots that she visited last year, as well as around her yard and street to look at things she walks past every day. “CNC is a great reminder to check out places near me,” Alyssa said. “The big thing for me this year is just the number of new-to-me species I was able to log, just by taking that little bit of extra time to pay attention to what’s around that I might not otherwise be drawn to or notice! This time of year is always really exciting to me, and CNC is a fun reminder that there’s still so much to learn. It’s also a reminder to revisit my old, well-known (plant) friends too.” And her efforts made a difference! Alyssa logged the second highest total identifications, putting her expertise to excellent use.

A steadfast champion for the City Nature Challenge, Associate Curator of Botany Mason Heberling uses the challenge to check out the woods nearby where he lives. “I get caught up in other things and forget to appreciate the hyper-local diversity, within walking distance,” Mason said. “I make it a point to visit the same woods by my house every CNC.” Despite travelling out of the area for much of the challenge, Mason logged nearly 100 local observations!

And then there’s Bonnie Isaac, the section’s Collection Manager. Although City Nature Challenge is not a competition, it’s worth noting and applauding Bonnie’s efforts – she logged the highest number of both observations and identifications in the Pittsburgh region this year! She made 607 observations, which totaled 343 different species, and identified a whopping 1,697 entries! Bonnie shared her reflections about the challenge and described why it’s so important to her.

“When I was young, I could not spend enough time outdoors. I was outside from sunup till sundown or until my folks came looking for me. My curiosity led me to want to know what everything I encountered was. One year one of my sisters gave me a Peterson field guide for Christmas. This led me to discover that there was a whole series of Peterson field guides. Thus began my collecting career. I had to have every Peterson Field Guide that came out. (I now have a complete set of Peterson Field Guides, leather bound editions.)  With these guides I could go out and try to identify everything I saw. I was in heaven. I am also a very competitive person. The City Nature Challenge takes what I love to do and makes it into a bit of a competition. I don’t live in the Pittsburgh City Nature Challenge region. I live in Lawrence County. During the pandemic the best I could do was help with identifying observations. Now that I can travel to the Pittsburgh region during the City Nature Challenge. Game on!” – Bonnie Isaac

For this year’s challenge, Bonnie visited Raccoon Creek State Park, Moraine State Park, Bradys Run Park, and Brush Creek Park. “The City Nature Challenge gives me a chance to get outside and see how many different things I can find,” Bonnie said. “Every year I challenge myself to find more species than I did the previous year. I also find identifying observations made by others somewhat satisfying. I get a chance to hone my identification skills and I get to see what others have found.”

Even for a botanist with decades of experience like Bonnie, each year brings surprises. “Every year there are surprises that I didn’t expect. I’ll discover that something is blooming that I didn’t think would be blooming yet, or I might find that someone found a plant growing in an area where I wouldn’t have expected it.”

Bonnie continued, “The top observations tend to be some of the same things, many plants that are not native to the area. It’s the things with only a couple observations that I find the most interesting. It’s these unusual observations that keep me eager to see what nifty things are being found basically in our own backyards. It also keeps me energized to get out and find more and to look closer for the minute details that might separate one species from another.” 

The iNaturalist app also allows for recordings of bird song, frog calls, and other sounds. Bonnie connected with a user who identified a unique feature on one of her uploaded recordings. “One of the surprises for me was someone contacting me to let me know that one of my bird recordings had gray tree frogs singing in the background.”

A Global Effort with Big Results

City Nature Challenge 2024 was not just a success in Pittsburgh – globally the number of cities participating increased to 690 this year, a big jump from 482 cities in 2023! Here are a few of the worldwide stats:

Total participants: 83,528 in 690 cities in 51 countries

Total observations made: 2.4 million

Total species identified: 65,682

The big winner across the board, with most observations, species, and participants is La Paz, Bolivia!

The City Nature Challenge returns next spring. Let’s see if we can build on the truly remarkable success of 2024!

Jessica Romano is Museum Education Writer at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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…if they don’t get eaten by their siblings first.

by Sabrina Spiher Robinson

Slipper snails, Crepidula fornicata, are a common find for shell collectors along the American east coast, and in some places on the west coast as well, where they have been accidentally introduced as an invasive species. But just because they’re common, doesn’t mean they’re not interesting – in fact, they’re one of the most well-studied marine snails, and all of that study has revealed a creature with a fascinating life cycle.

Crepidula are protandrous hermaphrodites – this means that all slipper snails begin their lives as male, and end their lives as female. As juveniles, they wander over the substrate, preferring hard surfaces like rocks, dock pilings, other shells, and even horseshoe crabs. But most C. fornicata will choose to settle on top of another C. fornicata, who might be settled atop another, and another, and so on. They live in stacks, sometimes of up to a dozen animals, one balancing on top of the next until their shells grow around each other, and they can no longer move, becoming sessile (stationary) by default.

Of course, a stack of all males won’t get very far reproductively. So, it’s time for at least a few C. fornicata to begin the next stage in their lives, and transition to females. Several things influence when the change takes place, primarily the animal’s size, because producing gametes is energetically costly: more sperm takes more energy than less sperm, and eggs take more energy than sperm altogether. But it’s not so straightforward as just growing to a certain size and changing sex. If there are no females around, for instance, some males will transition to females at smaller sizes than they usually would.¹  Alan Carillo-Boltodano and Rachel Collin write:

“In our experiment, pairs of snails (one small and one large) were kept in cups, either together or partitioned off with fine or coarse mesh, or partitioned, but switched from side to side to allow contact with the cup mate’s pedal mucus. The larger snails that were allowed contact with the smaller companions grew faster, and generally changed sex sooner, than did the larger snails in the barrier treatments, which allowed no physical contact. The smaller snails that were allowed contact with the larger cup mate delayed sex change compared to those separated from their cup mates … Our results suggest that the cue that affects size and time to sex change requires some kind of physical interaction that is lost when the snails are separated. Furthermore, contact with another snail’s pedal mucus does not compensate for the loss of physical contact.”²

In other words, when the slipper snails are in actual contact with each other, they seem to send signals to one another that help to coordinate growth and sex change.

In general, though, males will wait until they’re a certain size to transition, because larger males are more reproductively successful than smaller males, as determined by experiments that genetically test offspring to see whose genes were most successful in the stack. There’s one exception to this though – sneaky little guys! Male Crepidula inseminate females directly, so in general the male right on top of the female at the bottom of the stack will be the most successful fertilizer, and then the male on top of him, and then the others on top of them can’t reach and are out of luck for the moment. But! The smallest juvenile Crepidula, who have not yet chosen a stack of their own, have been found to sneak up on the substrate next to the female, inseminate her, and sneak away, using a strategy that gets around “bigger = more sperm.”³

Larger males might have more reproductive success than smaller males, but no one has more reproductive success than slipper snails who have transitioned to females. Eggs are a much bigger energy investment for an animal than sperm are, and so becoming a female requires a certain size to make the transition worthwhile. But once a slipper snail is female, she has a couple reproductive advantages: in the first place, she can hoard sperm for a long time, including her own from when she was a male, so she always has plenty of material to fertilize her eggs. This also means that while only a third or a quarter of the embryos will have a given male’s DNA, they’ll all have hers. Secondly, Crepidula females brood their young. Unlike many marine mollusks, who release their eggs and sperm into the water column where they meet and the embryo has to grow up among the plankton, at risk of becoming a meal for many things before they ever even get to grow into larvae, Crepidula keep their eggs in brooding pouches. Females keep between 15 and 20 pouches inside their shells, each containing between 50 and 450 embryos. She’ll brood them until they turn into larvae that can swim about on their own, keeping them safe to grow at least for a little while.

And thus, every Crepidula fornicata begins their life as a tiny, and sometimes sneaky, roaming male, sowing his wild oats; eventually he finds a nice stack to settle down on to become a dad; and then they transition sexes and live out her days as mother and base of the stack, brooding little babies in safety until they’re ready to hatch into larvae. Slipper snails make small stacks, but big happy families.

However, perhaps nowhere is safe. Once the eggs are brooding in their capsules, the mother slipper snail has no way to transfer additional nutrients or oxygen to the embryos.  This environment of scarcity leads some species of Crepidula embryos to start cannibalizing each other! The embryos of Crepidula coquimbensis, a species of Crepidula first described in Chile, have at least been found to be choosy about eating their brothers and sisters. Brood capsules are fertilized by multiple males, meaning all the embryos have the same mother, but not every embryo has the same father. It was discovered that cannibalistic embryos were much more likely to eat their half-siblings than their full siblings, thus protecting embryos they shared a complete set of DNA with. It’s still not known how these embryos recognize kinship, though.⁴ In another species of Crepidula, Crepidula navicella, a gene in some of the embryos in each capsule switches on and arrests their development, basically turning them into meals for their siblings, a genetic predisposition to being either a cannibalizer or a cannibalizee.⁵

Of course, once the larvae are released into open water, all bets are off, and a lot of filter-feeding animals, including other mollusks, including other Crepidula, might eat them. However, Jan Pechenik reports:

“… in our study the same adults usually ingested their own larvae at much slower rates than predicted from the rates at which they cleared water of phytoplankton. These slower rates may in part reflect an inability or reluctance of adults to ingest particles of such large size …  However, most of the larvae that we observed being entrained into adult feeding currents were ingested, and later appeared in feces, and adults were capable of ingesting larvae that were larger … Thus, lower than predicted rates of [larvae eating] by C. fornicata more likely reflect larval behavior – deliberate or not – reducing the likelihood of [getting drawn] into the adult feeding current, as suggested previously from studies with [other marine filter feeders].”⁶

At least baby Crepidula, once free, seem to have developed a way to avoid being eaten by their parents, if not their siblings!

Sabrina Spiher Robinson is Collection Assistant for the Section of Mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

References:

[1] Proestou, Dina A., Goldsmith, Marian, Twombly, Sarah (2008) “Patterns of Male Reproductive Success in Crepidula fornicata Provide New Insight for Sex Allocation and Optimal Sex Change.” The Biological Bulletin (Lancaster), vol. 214, no. 2, 2008, pp. 194–202, https://doi.org/10.2307/25066676.

[2] Carrillo-Baltodano, Allan, and Collin, Rachel (2015). “Crepidula Slipper Limpets Alter Sex Change in Response to Physical Contact with Conspecifics.” The Biological Bulletin (Lancaster), vol. 229, no. 3, 2015, pp. 232–42, https://doi.org/10.1086/BBLv229n3p232.

[3] Broquet, Thomas, et al. “The Size Advantage Model of Sex Allocation in the Protandrous Sex-Changer Crepidula fornicata: Role of the Mating System, Sperm Storage, and Male Mobility.” The American Naturalist, vol. 186, no. 3, 2015, pp. 404–20, https://doi.org/10.1086/682361.

[4] Brante A, Fernández M, Viard F (2013) Non-Random Sibling Cannibalism in the Marine Gastropod Crepidula coquimbensis. PLoS ONE 8(6): e67050, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0067050

[5] Lesoway, MP, Collin, R, Abouheif, E. (2017) “Early activation of MAPK and apoptosis in nutritive embryos of calyptraeid gastropods.” J. Exp. Zool. (Mol. Dev. Evol.) 328B: 449–461. doi:10.1002/jez.b.22745.

[6] Pechenik, Jan, Blanchard, Michel, Rotjan, Randi (2004) “Susceptibility of Larval Crepidula fornicata to Predation by Suspension-Feeding Adults.” Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology., vol. 306, no. 1, 2004, pp. 75–94, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jembe.2004.01.004.

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Do you ever wonder what made you pursue your dreams in life? When I ask myself this question, it inevitably takes me back to my childhood and the indelible memories that growing up in the most biodiverse country in the world left on me. From the diversity of fruit trees and the tiny animals that crawled them in my backyard to the varied ecosystems in the surrounding areas, living in Brazil has shaped my perception of nature and sparked a singular curiosity about the variety of forms and interactions I could observe. As the little scientist in me grew up, fueled by the fascination with the beautiful mysteries of flowers, it naturally guided me toward the path of studying plants and their interactions. 

As I stepped into the world of science, my first paid opportunity as an undergrad in biology was in a small herbarium. There I learned about preserving plant specimens collected from nature and their importance for identification and classification of plant species. What I did not realize back then was that herbaria store more than just names and relations among species; they also provide a means to investigate ecological interactions like the ones that captivated me as a child. I kept that flame of curiosity from my childhood alive and came to the US as a postdoc researcher. My research group at the University of Pittsburgh and I have been incorporating some unconventional uses of herbarium material into our research. In a recent scientific publication, we used herbarium specimens (many sourced from the CMNH herbarium) to explore a crucial ecological mutualism between animals that visit flowers for food and plants that require go-betweens to transport their pollen—a process called pollination.

In pollination biology, it is common to investigate floral characteristics because they play a crucial role in mediating plant interactions with their pollinators. For example, plants with long floral tubes are typically pollinated by morphologically matching long-tongued pollinators. While certain floral traits, such as visible color and scent, may be altered or completely lost during the drying process of plant specimens, many of the other characteristics remain accessible even after years of preservation. Thus, as long as the herbarium sheet contains at least one flower, valuable biological information can be extracted to understand plant-pollinator interactions.  

In this study, we used herbarium specimens to reveal the network of past plant-pollinator relationships. Specifically, we sampled a small piece of the flower, the stigma, which is the structure that receives pollen grains delivered by pollinators. As pollinators may visit several plant species flowering together, inspecting stigmas can unveil a plant’s pollination story. By assessing the diversity of pollen grains morphologically distinct from the target species, we gain insights into whether the target species interacted with many or only a few other plant species through pollinator sharing.

Leveraging herbarium specimens for ecological questions offers a unique advantage, as they provide historical, spatial, and long-term perspectives to scientific studies—dimensions that may otherwise be challenging to attain. In studies of plant-pollinator interactions, researchers often rely on direct pollinator observation data, which, while ideal, has limitations such as being time-consuming, costly, and dependent on various conditions. Pollen deposited on stigmas of herbarium specimens arises as a valuable alternative when direct pollinator observation is unfeasible. Herbaria offer scientists a convenient way to compare numerous plant species from around the world. Actively incorporating these specimens into research not only keeps the collections dynamic but also magnifies their overall significance. Much like the plant-pollinator interaction—it’s a win-win scenario. I hope our work inspires others to perceive herbarium collections as guardians of biodiversity and encourages scientists to unlock the hidden potential of their precious specimens.

Beyond the scientific excitement of unraveling the pollination story within herbarium specimens, I once again seemed to have missed yet another potential interaction they could reveal. While going through the cabinets housing the specimens at CMNH, I unexpectedly encountered plants collected from the same region where I was born and raised in Brazil. I never thought that an old, dried plant could make me feel closer to my homeland. Living abroad to pursue the scientific dream is no easy feat—different language, different culture. But that moment was a reminder of my childhood connection with nature that brought me here. Now, I see herbaria not only as guardians of biodiversity but also as promoters of a sense of belonging in us.

Nathália Susin Streher is a postdoctoral research associate in the Ashman Lab of University of Pittsburgh.

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What do we mean when we say we have type specimens in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) collections?  

Type specimens are (usually) the specimen(s) a person describing a new species looks at as they write the description (it’s this tall, this wide, this color, sculptured with bumps like this, etc.) and type specimens are the official name bearers for the whole species. 

There are many kinds of type specimens, but the most important kind is the holotype. Paratypes (other specimens the original describer believes are the same new taxon) are also important, but holotypes are the most important. Two other kinds of type specimen are lectotypes (selected from the paratypes if the holotype is lost) and neotypes (selected from any specimen if all type material is lost). Every time we add another holotype it bolsters the significance of CMNH’s already significant collections. It raises our visibility on the “radar” of researchers and puts us on the map for that taxon.

Carnegie Museum collaborator Dr. Aydin Örstan recently named a new subspecies of snail Albinaria coa tek (Örstan & Yildirim 2023). He deposited the holotype and 12 paratypes of the new subspecies in the Mollusks collection at CMNH.  

If a researcher wants to know if they have found another specimen of Dr. Örstan’s new subspecies, they could read his description. However, to be absolutely sure, a researcher might need to compare their finding to the type specimen. 

Think of types as the gold standard. Because of their importance to nomenclature and taxonomy (the science of naming species), most museums (including CMNH) keep their type specimens securely locked in a special cabinet.

With regard to this land snail holotype, for Carnegie Museum to have the holotype of Albinaria coa tek means that people studying that subspecies or closely related taxa might need to travel to the museum to examine the type specimen or ask for additional information about it. For their research paper to be complete, they would need to refer to that holotype specimen. In addition to the holotype, Dr. Örstan gave CMNH paratypes of Albinaria coa tek, which can be important for understanding the range of variation in the subspecies.

Albinaria are land snails that occur in SE Europe and the Middle East and are typically found on limestone. In some cases, they appear to have been able to form new colonies when ancient humans moved limestone around for buildings (the snails likely hitchhiked on the limestone blocks). That means we can trace trade routes over which ancient humans were moving limestone.

The family Clausiliidae (which contains the genus Albinaria) are of interest because they bear a clausilium, a kind of door for closing the shell (hence the common name “door snails”), which is unique to the family and is very different from the operculum, which is a different kind of door in many sea snails and some land snails. Furthermore, most snails in the family Clausiliidae coil counterclockwise, which is the opposite direction of more than 99% of all other snails. Additionally, Clausiliidae have a peculiar global distribution, being found in western Europe, Eastern Asia, and northern South America. People who study biogeography (how species came to be living where they are now) scratch their heads wondering how Clausiliidae came to be living in those three separate places without any individuals being found in between – for example, if they migrated from Europe to northern South America, why don’t any Clausiliidae occur in North America?

In addition to this new holotype (and paratypes) in the Section of Mollusks, holotype specimens of new species of vertebrates and paratypes of a new species of insect were named in 2023 and deposited in the relevant sections of the CMNH collection:

Pietro Calzoni, from the Universitá di Padova, Italy, and colleagues designated a CMNH Vertebrate Paleontology fossil as the holotype of a new bony fish species, Rhamphosus tubulirostris (Calzoni et al. 2023). 

Three new species of the insectivore mammal genus Plagioctenoides (P. cryptos, P. dawsonae, and P.goliath), and one new species of Cuetholestes (C. acerbus), were recently named from CMNH Vertebrate Paleontology fossils (Jones and Beard 2023). 

A CMNH Vertebrate Paleontology gekko fossil was designated as the holotype of Limnoscansor digitatellus (Meyer et al. 2023). CMNH visitors can view this specimen  on display in the Solnhofen case in the Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition.

A male and six female moths from the CMNH Invertebrate Zoology collection were named the new moth species Meganaclia johannae (Ignatev et al. 2023). The moths were collected between 1918 and 1925 in Cameroon and were housed in the Invertebrate Zoology collection awaiting discovery as new species. 

While CMNH welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors per year to the public galleries, scores of researchers work behind the scenes to expand our understanding of the different kinds of organisms, as evidenced by their type specimens, that are present in our incredible world. As the moth example demonstrates, Carnegie Museum of Natural History (and other museums around the world) hold specimens that have yet to be recognized as new species!

Timothy A. Pearce is Curator of Mollusks and Rachel Thomas Beckel is Administrative Coordinator for Science & Research at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

References

Calzoni, P., J. Amalfitano, L. Giusberti, M. Carnevale, and G. Carnevale. 2023. Eocene Rhamphosisdae (Teleostei: Syngnathiformes) from the Bolca Lagerstätte, Italy. Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Strigrafia, 129(3): 573-607. 

Ignatev, N., G.M. László, A. Paśnik, Z.F. Fric, H. Sulak, and G.C. Müller. 2023. Five new species of the genus Meganaclia Aurivillius, 1892 (Lepidoptera: Erebidae: Arctiinae: Syntomini). Zootaxa, 5296: 457–474. 

Jones, M., and K.C. Beard. 2023. Nyctitheriidae (Mammalia, ?Eulipotyphla) from the Late Paleocene of Big Multi Quarry, southern Wyoming, and a revision of the subfamily Placentidentinae. Annals of Carnegie Museum, 88(2): 115-159.

Meyer, D., C.D. Brownstein, K.M. Jenkins, and J. Gauthier. 2023. A Morrison stem gekkotan reveals gecko evolution and Jurassic biogeography. Proceedings of the Royal Society B., 290: 20232284.

Örstan, A., and M.Z. Yildirim. 2023. A new insular land snail, Albinaria coa tek Örstan, from Marmaris, Türkiye (Clausiliidae: Alopiinae). Archiv für Molluskenkunde, 152(2): 175-182. 

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This spring, thousands of people will join the City Nature Challenge, a global effort to document biodiversity safely and easily on the free iNaturalist app. Participating in the challenge is fun and rewarding – simply make observations of nature, take photos, and upload them to the app. The data collected during the challenge is shared with scientists around the world and helps them both document and better understand the diversity of species around us. This year’s challenge takes place April 25 through 28 for the observations, with a follow-up identification period from April 29 through May 1 when scientists and naturalists help observers properly identify the species they found. Participants will observe plants, insects, mammals, birds, mollusks, reptiles, amphibians, and more, right in their own neighborhoods. 

To help get us ready for this year’s challenge, Rachel Reeb, postdoctoral fellow in the Section of Botany at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, created this guide to finding and understanding invasive species of plants, including species like garlic mustard that is repeatedly one of the most often observed plants during the challenge. To get started, Rachel provided helpful definitions: 

Native or Indigenous species: Species that exist within an area due to natural evolution.

Introduced species: Species that have been introduced, by humans, to an area outside of its indigenous range. Roughly 25% of plant species in our environment are introduced.

Invasive species: A subset of introduced species which cause significant harm to the environment or human well-being. 

Naturalized species: A subset of introduced species which do not have demonstrated impacts on the environment or human well-being.

Observing Invasive Plants

When is the best time to spot invasive plants? In the early stages of spring! Since introduced invasive plants evolved in a different part of the world, they often have unique life cycles that start and end at a different time than the rest of the plant community. Invasive species like garlic mustard, lesser celandine, periwinkle, multiflora rose, and Amur honeysuckle are some of the first to start their life cycles in the spring, providing a surprising pop of greenery to an otherwise dormant forest understory. This ‘head start’ in the growing season gives invasive plants an advantage because they gain priority access to soil nutrients and sunlight, while other plants are still dormant. 

Unfortunately, what serves as an advantage for invasive plants is often a disadvantage to their neighbors, which now have a delayed start in the race to capture limited seasonal resources. Environmental experts in Pittsburgh are especially worried about the survival of rare native wildflowers, such as large white trillium, mayapple, and yellow trout lily. These plants, which have very specific habitat conditions and cannot easily relocate to new areas, are highly sensitive to changes in the environment and often cannot survive in areas where invasive plants are present.

During this year’s City Nature Challenge, we encourage you to take note of everything in nature, including the weeds. What do you notice about invasive plants in your area, like the timing of their life cycle, or how they interact with their neighbors? Have you ever wondered how these organisms came to be here? Many unwanted invasive plants were first introduced as popular garden center products. While some invasive species are now banned from sale, many can still be found in stores, like English ivy and Periwinkle vines.

Here are helpful lists of species you may encounter in our area:

Invasive Species

• Garlic Mustard 
• Lesser Celandine
• Knotweed 
• Multiflora Rose
• Amur Honeysuckle
• Periwinkle / Vinca 
• English Ivy 
• Japanese Barberry 
• Tree of heaven

Naturalized Species

• Common Dandelion
• White Clover

Native Spring Wildflowers 

• Mayapple
• Large White Trillium
• Dutchman’s Breeches
• Virginia Bluebells
• Common Blue Violet
• Yellow Trout Lily

How many of these species can you spot? Get your camera/phone/device and join the City Nature Challenge, April 25 through 28!

Rachel Reeb is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Section of Botany at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Jessica Romano is Museum Education Writer at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Last year, when Albert Kollar, Collection Manager of Invertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, was planning for, and later recovering from, knee surgeries, it was common to hear people wish him well by saying, “You’ll be back on the outcrop soon.” In the wake of his untimely death last week, those wishes are worth examining for all they capture of Albert’s generous and long-standing sharing of geologic knowledge.

Outcrop, as anyone who participated in one of his geology-focused hikes already knows, refers to the part of a rock layer that can be seen at the Earth’s surface. Pittsburgh’s location amid a deeply eroded Appalachian plateau assures a richness of local outcrops. In river and stream cuts, natural features that in many places acquired sharper edges through the construction of road or railway terraces, multiple sedimentary units appear stacked like layers of a cake. Albert had a deep and working understanding of each of these massive rock units. He could patiently explain how their differing composition implied dramatic past changes in climate, sea level, plant cover, and even continent position. 

For prolonged discussions of local geology, Albert introduced audiences to several rock units prominent or economically important enough to have earned names, the Birmingham Shale, the Morgantown Sandstone, the Ames Limestone, and the Pittsburgh Coal. In explaining that every rock unit, whether it held fossils or not, contained a story about its formation, Albert would frequently distribute hand samples from these units. When the audience was a middle school class, the students could take the samples home, souvenirs not just from the museum, but from the outcrop.

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Thank you to Joann Wilson and the Invertebrate Paleontology team for the photos.

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As the seasons change from winter to spring here in western Pennsylvania, a common sight on a recent walk included fallen and decomposing trees. Interesting to look at and begging to be photographed, these fallen trees also hold a very important role in the ecosystem. 

Dead and fallen trees are host to many forms of wildlife, some of which are easy to spot, like squirrels, woodpeckers, and snakes, while others may require a closer look to identify, including fungi, insects, and salamanders. These organisms use the trees for food and shelter, and as the tree decomposes further, the nutrients absorb into the soil and set up favorable conditions for new growth. This cycle is crucial to the health of forests – in fact, numerous species rely on this process to thrive. According to the National Wildlife Federation, “Dead trees provide vital habitat for more than 1,000 species of wildlife nationwide. They also count as cover and places for wildlife to raise young in the requirements for Certified Wildlife Habitat designation.” 

Dead trees are identified two ways:

Snag – a dead tree that is still standing upright while decomposing

Log – the part of a snag that has fallen or partially fallen to the ground

Snags and logs each contribute to a thriving ecosystem in different ways. Snags can have cavities that house mammals, birds, and insects, and can be used for storage or look-out points. Logs on the ground can also act as hiding spots and nests, and as they decompose they provide the nutrients that recycle back into the soil. For those curious for more details about which species in PA utilize snags and logs, Penn State Extension has a thorough list.

The photos used here were taken at Hartwood Acres, one of the Allegheny County Parks located in Hampton Township, north of Pittsburgh. Some trees appeared to be freshly uprooted, with the circumference of the base of the tree standing several feet high, while others had clearly been decomposing for quite some time, with the trunk completely hollowed out. 

When a tree is uprooted from some type of disturbance event like a storm, it makes space for another topographical feature, pits and mounds. A pit forms in the space where the roots and soil are pulled up. Over time, the root mass decays and falls to the ground, creating a mound on the surface. This is called a micro-topographical feature because it forms around the base of a single tree. Pit-and-mound features create new habitats for wildlife and can often be used as breeding grounds for amphibians when water collects in the pit from runoff. The amount and frequency of mounds in forests can give clues to what caused the trees to fall, and even age of the forest as mounds form over extended periods of time.  

It’s not a coincidence that there are varying types of fallen trees in one park; forest experts monitor these fallen trees and follow guidelines for how many to leave in an area, at times clearing them to help control pests or other safety factors.

Keep in mind it can be dangerous to touch or climb on these fallen trees, especially if they appear rotted. The structure of the wood breaks down slowly but surely and the logs can be weaker than they appear. For that reason it’s better to admire the interesting sight from a distance or at least without touching it. As spring arrives and the tree canopy and forest understory fill in, a return trip will hopefully provide opportunity to spot some of the species benefitting from these fascinating snags and logs.

A perfect opportunity to search for fallen trees and the wildlife that utilizes the newly-created ecosystem is the City Nature Challenge. Using the free app iNaturalist, take and upload photos of nature from April 26 through 29, 2024 and help safely document biodiversity where you live! Learn more about the City Nature Challenge.

Jessica Romano is Museum Education Writer at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Sources

1. National Wildlife Federation
2. The Wildlife News
3. Penn State Extension

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Within the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, one may be surprised to find more than the biological specimens, fossils, and extensive anthropological and archaeological materials that the museum is best known for. As a major scientific institution that collects and conducts research, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History also has its own “Natural History Art” Collection, formerly known as the M. Graham Netting Animal Portraiture Collection, named after the herpetologist, former CMNH director, and founder of the collection. Consisting mostly of mid-twentieth-century naturalist and scientific illustrations, this collection serves as a useful addition to the museum’s resources that complements its research activities. Naturalist and scientific illustration involves skills beyond image-making and can resemble scientific research in that it requires artists to closely observe, and often travel to, their subjects to fully understand them and render them accurately. 

Within the collection are several women artists and scientific illustrators who each contributed to the genres of naturalist and scientific illustration. In this post I will feature the artists Winifred Austen, Germaine A. Bernier-Boulanger, Florence Malewotkuk, and an artist only identified (for now) as “Deirdre E. L.,” who are all worth celebrating this Women’s History Month. Although greatly outnumbered in the collection by their male counterparts, the women in CMNH’s Natural History Art Collection, and their respective works, speak volumes. With some pieces dating to over one hundred years ago, these artworks are proof that women have always had important roles to play in art and science, and it is just the conditions of patriarchal societies that have limited them. Despite their existence as a minority in the field of naturalist and scientific illustration, and the associated income and opportunity disparities that came with that status, these women persevered to create the beautiful, informative, and humorous art below.

Winifred Austen

One such artist is Winifred Austen, an English painter, etcher, and engraver whose work became most popular in the 1940s and 1950s with her wildlife illustrations in books and magazines. Produced as an illustration for F.B. Kirkman’s British Bird Book, Austen’s Golden Orioles (1909) is a lovely example of her expertise in wildlife painting, specifically birds. While the orioles are painted with a thoughtful hand in precise, impressive detail, their surrounding environment is rendered in a far more impressionistic style, emphasizing Austen’s utilization of her formal training in the arts, but also her choice to employ individualistic, stylistic expression and creativity. Even though these watercolors were intended to act as visual references for the texts they were accompanying, Austen still managed to contribute in a manner that was unique to her. Austen’s art can be praised for the dynamism of her subjects, and her portrayal of birds as they would appear in their natural environments, rather than in the static and perfectly poised way some other naturalist illustrators tend to favor.

Austen attended and trained formally at the London County Council School of Arts and Crafts and exhibited her work often with the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, following a similar trajectory as many of her male contemporaries. With that being said, Austen also made incredible progress despite being a minority in her practice, for example, she was the only woman to be published in the British Bird Book.

Germaine A. Bernier-Boulanger

A prime example of a woman who knew her worth as a scientist, educator, and artist, and settled for nothing less, is Germaine A. Bernier-Boulanger (1909-1989). Salvelinus fontinalis, female (c. 1953), a highly detailed, scientific illustration of a female spotted trout, is one of three prints in the collection by Bernier-Boulanger. Unlike the more painterly quality of Austen’s watercolors, Bernier-Boulanger’s work highlights the more research-intensive, “art for science’s sake” approach to wildlife illustration that contributed greatly to the discipline of non-photographic specimen documentation. Bernier-Boulanger had formally studied embryology and invertebrate zoology and didn’t become a professional illustrator until after the age of forty. Before focusing on her art, Bernier-Boulanger was employed at the Montreal Botanical Institute, and later, the University of Montreal, where she left her post as an educator after experiencing no change in her career trajectory, despite voicing her disapproval of the discrepancies in pay and career advancement between herself and her male colleagues in the natural sciences department. During Women’s History Month, it is especially important to tell the stories of women like Bernier-Boulanger, not only because of their knowledge, skill, and contributions to their respective fields, but also because they challenged long-standing discriminatory practices against women within the institutions they worked for, acting as catalysts for change.

Florence Malewotkuk

Florence Malewotkuk (1906-1971) (Yup’ik) was born in a village on St. Lawrence Island on the Bering Sea, which is part of Alaska. Malewotkuk’s Husky Dog Team (circa 1950s-60s) is one of three prints by the artist in the collection by Malewotkuk, each part of a series she titled “Bering Sea Originals.” Depicting husky dogs lined up in front of drying pelts, this print, along with the others in the collection depicting walrus and polar bears, offers unembellished images of local wildlife, and the intersection with nonhuman animals and Yup’ik communities. Showing talent from an early age, Malewotkuk began working as a professional artist in her early twenties when commissioned by Otto William Geist, an archaeologist, to capture everyday scenes of Yup’ik life. Further commissions followed for Malewotkuk later in life, and today her art is housed in collections across North America. Malewotkuk’s story indicates the opportunities that art production offers to women, and the importance of having members of Indigenous groups, especially women, depict their culture from their point of view.

Deirdre E. L.

Tucked away in a drawer of archival ephemera in the Natural History Art Collection is a folder of comedic cartoon illustrations by the artist Deirdre E. L. With the signature “Deirdre” at the bottom of the sketches being the only source of information available on the artist, it would seem that we must let her work speak where a biography is absent. Perhaps designed for the amusement of CMNH staff or for print in museum publications, Deirdre’s sketches combine silly captions and quirky caricatures with relevant information about the museum. Her sketch of CMNH chief staff artist Ottmar Von Fuehrer jokes about his going “directly to nature” (by sticking his head in a lion’s mouth) for inspiration, and is a fine example of this fun dichotomy. Her heart-warming sketch of a couple embracing under an equally affectionate pair of dinosaur fossils captures her sketchy, endearing drawing style. 

In this brief survey, I hope to have captured a glimpse of the talented women artists and scientific illustrators in CMNH’s Natural History Art collection. As a History of Art and Architecture and Museum Studies student at Pitt, I have been very interested in exploring the many intersections that exist between the disciplines of art and natural histories, including questions like: What distinguishes a scientific illustrator from an artist, if there is any distinction at all? How do women fit into and contribute to these respective disciplines historically? And how do studies of gender reveal vital information about science and art history? I look forward to discovering new artists as I continue to work with the Natural History Art Collection as an intern, especially women whose presence in the collection inspire me to learn more about those who challenged, and continue to challenge, societal expectations and make lasting contributions to the worlds of art and science. 

Olivia Buehler is an intern in the Section of Anthropology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Did you know that invertebrate fossils make up more than 50% of the specimens on exhibit in Dinosaurs in Their Time (DITT)? It’s true! But these fossils can be easy to miss among the giant dinosaurs and vertebrate reptiles. Luckily, ongoing research on the biodiversity within our gallery spaces, from locations including England, Germany, and the United States, will help visitors better understand the importance of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Invertebrate Paleontology collection research, exhibition, and education initiatives¹. With few exceptions, these specimens are part of the vast Ernest de Bayet fossil collection purchased for the museum by Andrew Carnegie in 1903^1,2.

What are Crinoids?

Among these invertebrates are a unique group of sea bearing animals called crinoids. Crinoids are an ancient fossil group that belong to the phylum Echinodermata. Crinoids first appeared in the fossil record in the mid-Cambrian Period of the Paleozoic Era (490 – 250 million years ago) and became a significant group that formed mid-Silurian reefs in Dudley, Wales; Gotland Island, Sweden; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the Mesozoic Era, crinoids formed the famous middle Triassic reefs of Germany³. Few crinoid groups live in oceans today. Examples of crinoids are on display in the museum’s Triassic Seas, Holzmaden, and Solnhofen dioramas (all locations in Germany)¹. Crinoids are also called sea lilies because they look like flowers – but don’t be fooled, they’re animals! Crinoids are related to starfish, sea urchins, and brittle stars; this relationship can be noted in the crinoids five-part radial symmetry^3,4. They lived on stems (or stalks) and attached to the sea floor by roots, as in the Triassic Muschelkalk Formation, but were floating animals in the Jurassic Holzmaden seas. They relied on waves and currents to bring small food particles past their petal-like arms which opened as a mode of filter-feeding micro-organic food^3,4. Today, Crinoids are few in numbers living among shallow coral reefs and in the deep sea. The Bayet Collection of crinoid fossils are represented from the Silurian, Mississippian, and Triassic rock formations¹.

However, crinoid fossils are more than scientific material reserved for use by paleontologists alone, in fact, this invertebrate animal is unique as it gives us the opportunity to see how humans have long interacted with nature. Specifically, fossilized crinoid stems have been used in several communities and throughout history as beads. This is due to their small size, cylindrical shape, and the usual occurrence of a hole in the center (fig. 2). So, let’s explore how crinoid fossils have been used on different continents and in different eras of human history.

Crinoid Beads in North America

In Kentucky, amateur fossil hunters commonly refer to crinoid stem fossils as beads⁵ and the Illinois Archaeological Survey has reported “crinoid stems suggested to function as beads” at a historic site in Buckman Flats⁶. This finding joins crinoid stems already uncovered in Kickapoo territories in 2011 and 1992 as well as a 2001 discovery at a Potawatomi settlement⁶. To illustrate an example of historic beadwork by North American indigenous groups, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology has published a photograph depicting a “string of prehistoric beads made from different sizes of fossilized crinoid stem[s]” discovered in Tennessee⁷.

Crinoid Beads in Asia

From the lower paleolithic period in Israel, a deposit at the archaeological site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov revealed two “beadlike” crinoid fossils among stone artwork and polished wood artifacts. This collection is thought to hint at the group’s cognitive ability regarding the manipulation of nature for artistic and cultural purposes and has brought the hypothesis that lower paleolithic hominids collecting crinoid stems, among other marine objects, may be the origin of the modern bead shape⁸. The thought process behind this theory relies on our understanding that crinoids, and their fossilized stems, have existed for far longer than the modern bead has. Bednarik argues, “perhaps this is how the very concept came into being, and the humanly made disc beads were merely substitutes for the fossils that were in short supply”⁹.

Crinoid Beads in Europe

While there are several instances of crinoid stems being recognized in historic European art and culture, the cemetery at Zvejnieki in Latvia is a unique case as the stems, or “beads,” seem to be a part of funerary practice. Zvejnieki was in use during the region’s Mesolithic and Neolithic periods and rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1960s. Work at the site has continued and a re-analysis of a double burial revealed that a beaded ornament among the remains, previously believed to have been made of bird bone, is a string of fossilized crinoid stems¹⁰. This case brings us to an interesting question in assessing the use of fossils, such as crinoid stems, throughout human history, and the impact of such encounters on our current relationship with the natural world.

So, the next time you walk through the museum, we invite you to take a closer look at the crinoids, and other invertebrate fossils on display, and imagine how else we may incorporate them in our lives!

Elizabeth A. Begley is Collection Assistant and Albert D. Kollar Collection Manger in the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

References: 

1. Kollar, A.D., J. L. Wilson, and S.K. Mills. 2024. The Ernest de Bayet Fossil Collection at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History: A Century of Stewardship in Exhibition. Annals of Carnegie Museum.
2. Wilson, J. L., A.D. Kollar, and S.K. Mills. 2024. Unraveling the 120 Year Mystery of Ernest Bayet and his Fossil Collection at Carnegie Museum. Annals of Carnegie Museum.
3. Hess, H., W. I. Ausich, C. E. Brett, and M.J. Simms. 1999. Fossil Crinoids. Cambridge University Press.  

4. Brezinski, D.K., and A.D. Kollar. 2008. Geology and Fossils of the Tri-State Region Learning/Activities/Coloring Book. PAlS Publication 8. 
5. Kentucky Geological Survey. Identifying Unknown Fossils. https://www.uky.edu/KGS/fossils/fossilid.php
6. Fishel, R. 2017. The Historic Indian Artifact Assemblage at Buckman Flats, Knox County, Illinois. Illinois Archaeology Vol. 29. 
7. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. String of prehistoric beads made from different sizes of fossilized crinoid stem. Artstor. https://www-jstor-org.cmu.idm.oclc.org/stable/community.20420806
8. Bednarik, R. 1994. The Pleistocene Art of Asia. Journal of World Prehistory, 8(4), 351–375. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25800655
9. Bednarik, R. 2005 .Middle Pleistocene Beads and Symbolism. Anthropos, 100(2), 537-552. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40466555  
10. Macāne, A. 2020. Petrified animals: Fossil beads from a Neolithic hunter-gatherer double burial at Zvejnieki in Latvia. Antiquity, 94(376), 916-931. doi:10.15184/aqy.2020.124 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/petrified-animals-fossil-beads-from-a-neolithic-huntergatherer-double-burial-at-zvejnieki-in-latvia/A325BCCE572DA6DD3AE913E7C22C18C2

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March Mammal Madness (MMM) bracket advice: look up the scientific names of species on the MMM website before you make your predictions. While MMM can be silly and ridiculous, it is an educational tool and the details matter. Let’s explore why by looking at the Pitcher Plant (7) vs. Northern Short-tailed Shrew (10) match.  

Pitcher plant isn’t a specific species of plant, rather it describes plants with a modified leaf that resembles and acts like a pitfall trap. 

Bonnie Isaac, Collection Manager of Botany, says:

Generally, when we use the term pitcher plant, we are referring to a member of either Sarraceniaceae or Nepenthaceae. Both pitcher plant families evolved in areas where essential nutrients for plants are lacking. They needed to find a way to get their nutrients by other means. Enter carnivory.

Pitcher plants in both families primarily eat insects, but they are generalists that will catch and digest anything that comes along. However, one of these families is more likely than the other to be able to digest the Northern Short-tailed Shrew. 

Bonnie tells us:  

Sarraceniaceae are normally ground dwelling plants with trumpet-shaped leaves that are used to capture their prey. Many of these pitcher plants have hairs on the inside of the tube that point downward to keep the prey from crawling out. They may also have clear areas near the top of the tube to attract insects.  

Members of Nepenthaceae are tropical plants that frequently have a climbing stem. The modified pitcher leaves on these plants are normally of two types: one grows up in the trees that support the vine, the other grows near the ground. The trap leaves near the ground are normally larger than the aerial trap leaves and can digest larger prey. With two types of traps these plants are opportunists and ready to capture whatever may happen into the traps. 

The pitchers of Sarraceniaceae are normally not large enough to hold a Northern Short-tailed Shrew. Nepenthes on the other hand has pitchers that are large enough to hold shrews. Some Nepenthes species attract rodents by giving them a reward. The rodent in turn gives the plant nutrients either by defecating into the toilet-shaped leaf or by falling into the pitcher and being digested. Species of Nepenthes are known to trap and digest vertebrates, including rats and mice. If by chance a Northern Short-tailed Shrew happened upon a Nepenthes and fell into the trap the shrew wouldn’t stand a chance.  

Since the species of pitcher plant selected for March Mammal Madness is Nepenthes rajah, it has a chance to beat the Northern Short-tailed Shrew (Blarina brevicauda).  

Sue McLaren, Collection Manager of Mammals, also notes that either competitor has a chance (it is March Mammal Madness, after all):  

When I think of the short-tailed shrew, I think of a fierce temperament when confronted by something dangerous. They are good climbers (I’ve seen them climb a tree trunk to a point at least eight feet off the ground). Even though their claws seem a little puny, they are more fossorial (adapted for digging and burrowing) than any other shrew so they can dig their way through densely compacted leaves and easily move through some types of soil (probably not heavy clay).  Finally, they have salivary glands that produce a toxin that can subdue prey that are larger than themselves – salamanders, frogs, mice, and even birds!  However, their climbing ability is probably their best defensive from inside a pitcher plant. 

Anything could happen in this sure-to-be-exciting match! But if the pitcher plant was from the family Sarraceniaceae it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting.  

Want to play March Mammal Madness?  

Get started with these links: 

Get your bracket  

Look up the Latin binomials  

Learn how to play 

Fill out your bracket by March 10, 2024 to play this year. The competition kicks off March 11 with the Wild Card: Rainbow Grasshopper (Dactylotum bicolor) vs. Sparklemuffin Peacock Spider (Maratus jactatus).

Erin Southerland is Communications and Social Media Manager at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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