Carnegie Museum of Natural History
One of the Four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
Did you know that the Section of Mollusks Assistant Curator Tim Pearce has been conducting monthly behind-the-scenes tours for the public since 2007?
On these tours, participants often learn for the first time that the museum has huge collections and scientists who conduct
research, and they see crowd pleasers such as the killer sea snail, the giant clam, and they look through the shell to see the beating heart of a live land snail.
Check our Section of Mollusks for tour times!
Assistant Curator and Malacologist Dr. Timothy Pearce explains why slugs are slimy and talks about the incredible and useful properties of slug slime.
Ask a Scientist is a new short video series where we ask our research staff questions about the millions of amazing objects and specimens stored in our collection. Tune in on YouTube, and submit your own questions via Twitter @CarnegieMNH.
by Patrick McShea
The shell-encrusted shopping cart in We Are Nature would get lots of visitor attention even if it weren’t suspended from the ceiling. Hundreds of zebra mussels coat the familiar contraption, creating an eerily appropriate symbol for human-altered natural systems: An empty icon of consumer culture armored by hitchhiking organisms of global trade.
Zebra mussels, a freshwater species native to the Caspian Sea and Black Sea, were unwittingly introduced into the Great Lakes during the 1980s via ballast water dumped by ocean-crossing cargo ships. The creature’s rapid dispersal since then has been attributed to the passive drifting of tiny larvae and the ability of mature zebra mussels to attach to boats moving between the lakes and adjacent river systems.
As invaders, zebra mussels have profound effects on ecosystems. They feed by filtering tiny organisms from the water, and by sheer numbers can out-compete fish larvae and native mussel species dependent on the same food source. Zebra mussels attach to any submerged hard surface. Their profusion attracts attention when it results in clogged water in-take pipes, but not necessarily when thousands of the striped fingernail-sized creatures occupy physical positions atop existing beds of native freshwater mussels.
At Carnegie Museum of Natural History, concern for the health of our region’s diverse population of native freshwater mussels has a long history. In 1909, Arnold Ortmann, then Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, termed the disappearance of mussel species “the first sign of pollution of a dangerous character in a stream.” His observation was based upon biological surveys in rivers and streams throughout Western Pennsylvania, fieldwork performed during a time of rapid industrialization that garnered the museum an irreplaceable collection of local mussel shells.
Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences of working at the museum.
by Timothy A. Pearce
We humans like to think we are special among all creatures. To support that notion, we claim unique traits such as language, tool use, consciousness, etc. Oops, all of those traits have now been shown to occur in other species. Do not fear, though, for I have found a trait that seems to be unique to humans: a fondness for 90 degree angles (aka right angles). You heard it here first! I don’t know where on the evolutionary lineage to modern humans we acquired this fondness for right angles, but evidence of this fondness is all around us in the modern built environment.
What does fondness for right angles have to do with scallop eyes? First let me tell you about the amazing eyes of scallops. They have up to 200 eyes along the mantle margin, and those eyes contain concave mirrors. Instead of being similar to cameras (as our, and most, eyes are), scallop eyes are similar to reflecting telescopes, and each eye has two retinas so they can see clearly in both narrow and peripheral views at the same time.
New research published this week in Science (and described in the New York Times ) demonstrates that the concave mirror of each scallop eye is tiled with more than 100,000 square mirror tiles. Did you get that? They are squares! Outside of the human built environment, right angles are scarce. So to find squares in the eyes of scallops is remarkable. The properties of the tiles making up the mirror has implications for the scallop’s ability to see in the particular wavelengths of light in its surroundings and can inspire improved human optical devices. Future studies will have to examine why a scallop needs to have such amazing vision. But for now, I am amazed to know that scallop eyes contain square mirrors.
Timothy A. Pearce, PhD, is the head of the mollusks section at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.
Dr. Tim Pearce, assistant curator and Head of Section of Mollusks, was recently featured in the Curator’s Corner—a newsletter from Dr. José H. Leal, science director and curator at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum—after he participated in the 83rd Meeting of the American Malacological Society at the University of Delaware.
“Some of the highlights of the meeting included a special workshop sponsored by iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections) on mollusks collections online, Digitizing the 2nd Largest Invertebrate Phylum: Mollusks; the President Symposium, Mollusk research in a digital world: creating, integrating and mining large datasets; and Mollusks in Peril 2017 (MIP 2017, organized by yours truly), a follow-up to the successful Mollusks in Peril 2016 Forum, held in May 2016 at the Shell Museum and sponsored by Smoky and Stephanie Payson.”
-Dr. Leal
Did you know researchers and scientists are at work in the museum every day?
Visitors got an inside look at the behind-the-scenes science of our museum by interacting with Carnegie scientists at a special Super Science Saturday—Scientist Takeover!
Entomologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, and other scientists spent Saturday, July 22 in the galleries showing off their cool collections, answering questions, and discussing their work with curious museum-goers. Visitors also enjoyed tours and hands-on activities like sifting through soil to find Pennsylvania land snails.
Super Science Saturdays is a program at Carnegie Museum of Natural History that invites visitors of all ages to explore a special theme through hands-on activities, experiments, demonstrations, discussions with museum experts, and more. Events are free with museum admission.
Don’t miss our next event, Whiskers and Woofs, on August 19.
