Biodiversity Oral History Project Pilot: Snails of San Francisco

From left to right, Helminthoglypta nickliniana, Helminthoglypta arrosa, Haplotrema minimum

A little while ago I was talking with my co-worker Rebecca and we were lamenting the fact that so much knowledge about the natural world is locked up in the brains of a few, not because they guard it jealously, but because these tidbits are either too minor and disjointed to be publishable as scientific research, or because they are qualitative, or seem obvious to the experts. What a shame! We felt like every time we had the privilege to go out into the field with these kinds of people, they would reveal amazing facts about the predatory habits of parasitic wasps, or where to find butterflies in the rain, along with wonderful stories about how they came to know these things, but the only way for others to know them would be to find them out for themselves, or walk around with an expert for a few hours.

So we came up with an idea: why not start a biodiversity oral history project to record these facts and stories, along with the voices of the people who told them to us. At a bare minimum, we could start recording these conversations we were having and post them online, but at a resplendently-attired maximum we could publish these recordings alongside written, searchable transcripts, with photos and/or video recorded during these hikes. To give these walks a bit of structure beyond just having conversations, we could organize the projects around making very local field guides, so the ostensible point of the walks would be for the expert to introduce the recorder to the topic of the guide and seek out the organisms in question, and the recorder would record everything the expert said during the walk, take pictures of the organisms they found, do some research based on what they learned, and assemble the guide in collaboration with the expert.

We talked with Heather, the Academy's chief librarian, and she thought it sounded like a good idea and had thoughts about how to host the data and do the transcription, and maybe even fund it, but first we had to try it! I know embarrassingly little about mollusks despite my love of nudibranchs, so I suggested we start with the land snails of San Francisco, and Heather had just the expert in mind: Neil Fahy, retired geologist, avid amateur malacologist, Academy research associate, and longtime San Franciscan.

To start things out, I wanted to follow a model like this:

  1. Sit down inside with the expert, talk about what species need to go in the guide, and decide where to go look for them.
  2. Go look for the organisms and photograph the heck out of them!

Meetup

So, Neil and I set up a meeting at the Academy and talked about snails! He told me he'd deposited his manuscript on Bay Area snails at the Academy, and recommended some other literature for me to check out (which I later did), and we planned a hike to go look for snails. Neil recommended Crystal Springs Reservoir / San Andreas Lake as a decent spot, which is owned by the city of San Francisco, even though it's outside the city limits, so we set a date.

I went through Neil's manuscript and a checklist of SF snails he sent me that was exported from Roth and Sadeghian and used that for the skeleton of the guide using iNaturalist Guides. It became immediately apparent to me that Helminthoglypta was an important and diverse group of native California snails, but they all kind of looked the same, so I was eager to get out in the field and learn about them.

In the field

Neil and I met up at San Andreas Lake in Millbrae, I set him up with a recorder, and we started walking. My recording setup was not terribly sophisticated, and the recording shows it! I just took a pair of earbud headphones with an inline mic, paperclipped it to Neil's jacket so the headphones were tucked away and the mic was exposed, and plugged them into a smartphone, which I put in Neil's pocket. I did the same for myself so I could mix together both audio tracks if Neil's didn't capture my side of the conversation (it did a decent enough job). The apps I was using were Voice Recorder Pro on my iPhone and Smart Voice Recorder on an Android phone. I gave Neil the Android phone figuring I would want to use mine for photos and such, but I think that was a mistake b/c the Audio quality ended up being worse, regardless of mic placement. That may have just been the device though, which was a 3+ years old. Also, the paperclip wasn't really the best fastening device. So main technical findings for recording were

  1. Give your best setup to the expert
  2. Cheap headphones with a mic are fine, but use one of those bigger black, clamshell-like clips instead of a paperclip
  3. Record compressed audio! Uncompressed audio files get big fast

Overall I think it went great. We only found 3 snail species, but I learned a ton in the process, particularly about those Helminthoglypta species, which can be separated in the field (H. arrosa is much more common and generally has an open umbilicus, while H. nickliniana usually has a closed umbilicus and has a distinct, regular pattern of oblique ridges on the shell, though you'd need a sharp macro shot or a hand lens to see them).

Follow up

Of course I also learned a bunch going through my photos and revisiting some of the literature on the species we saw. Pilsbry, for instance, is an amazing resource with a great deal of detail on Californian species, including photos and very detailed locality data.

Reviewing the audio was pretty time-consuming, I have to admit. I was hoping to just upload the file to soundcloud and use it for annotation, but I think that would put me over my free quota, so I turned to Audacity, which isn't quite as nice to look at, but get's the job done for file format conversion, syncing multiple audio tracks, and annotation using label tracks. Pretty amazing open source tool, frankly. The main challenge was that I had 6 hours of audio to review! Audacity makes it easy to skip around to where people are talking, and I made labels for all sections where Neil was talking about snails or something else I found interesting. I've included a few tracks here for you to check out.

01-local-history-of-the-portola-expedition.mp3

02-local-geology.mp3

03-serpentine-land-snails-and-vegetation-preferences-or-lack-thereof.mp3

04-what-drives-snail-distribution.mp3

05-how-to-search-for-snails-shell-decomposition.mp3

06-snakes-kites-humans-and-other-snail-predators.mp3

07-on-studying-newt-development.mp3

08-arboreal-snails.mp3

09-our-first-snail-helminthoglypta-arrosa-how-to-identify-it-how-to-photograph-snails.mp3

10-on-the-caifornia-lancetooth-a-carnivorous-snail-that-eats-other-snails.mp3

11-on-collecting-snails.mp3

12-check-the-bottom-of-slopes-for-shells.mp3

13-how-neil-got-interested-in-snails.mp3

14-on-teaching-kids.mp3

15-bleaching-and-the-effect-of-the-rain.mp3

16-how-to-find-living-snails.mp3

17-finding-a-live-h-arrosa.mp3

18-on-tentacles-nativity-and-preserving-juveniles.mp3

19-on-teaching-students.mp3

20-dietary-preferences-of-h-arrosa-and-haplotrema.mp3

Future

So first of all I need to sit down with Neil again, and look at the remaining species and think about where to find them, and then we need to do so.

I'd also like to peruse the Academy's collections with Neil and photograph some of the species that don't have licensed or public domain photos online. The Academy also has a number of slides of terrestrial mollusks that I'd like to try digitizing.

Also wondering what role journaling should play in this process. I'm taking a few text notes from our discussions, but maybe blogging would be a better, more open way to do that.

Publicado el enero 9, 2015 01:38 MAÑANA por kueda kueda

Observaciones

Fotos / Sonidos

Qué

Hiedra Amarilla (Delairea odorata)

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 10:04 MAÑANA PST

Fotos / Sonidos

Qué

Toyón (Heteromeles arbutifolia)

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 10:24 MAÑANA PST

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 10:27 MAÑANA PST

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 09:45 MAÑANA PST

Fotos / Sonidos

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kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 09:34 MAÑANA PST

Fotos / Sonidos

Qué

Pie Azul (Collybia nuda)

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 10:30 MAÑANA PST

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 11:47 MAÑANA PST

Descripción

I think this was nickliniana...

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 12:46 TARDE PST

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 01:03 TARDE PST

Fotos / Sonidos

Qué

Liquen de Encino (Evernia prunastri)

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 01:57 TARDE PST

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 09:25 MAÑANA PST

Descripción

In "northern San Mateo county" there are supposedly two species of Helminthoglypta, H. arrosa and H. nickliniana. The former has an open umbilicus (the hole in the middle of the spiral of the shell when viewed from below), while the latter has a flag of the aperture covering the umbilicus. This and many others were found at the bottom of a slope. Coast live oak was the dominant tree.

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 10:01 MAÑANA PST

Descripción

A living individual found between the bark and wood of a fallen log.

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 10:36 MAÑANA PST

Descripción

A predatory snail that eats other snails. Its shell is almost flat when viewed from the side, i.e. the spiral doesn't really go up.

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 10:47 MAÑANA PST

Descripción

Umbilicus fully covered, and I think I can see the reticulated pattern on the shell described by Pilsby: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822013176466;view=1up;seq=118

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 10:42 MAÑANA PST

Descripción

An example of what looks to me like an intermediate Helminthoglypta. From the photos I took it seems like lip of the aperature curves more in H. arrosa, which would suggest arrosa for this one, though the umbilicus seems half covered.

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 12:07 TARDE PST

Descripción

Lots of these around today. Found two logs with a big adult and a small juvenile. Bigger was male under one log, female under another. Coincidence or pattern?

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 12:13 TARDE PST

Descripción

I know I've seen pictures of something like this, just need to hunt them down...

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 12:26 TARDE PST

Descripción

Neil was surprised to find an all-yellow individual this far north. Apparently the position of the air hole with respect to the mantle can be diagnostic, as can the presence of dirt along the tail end.

Fotos / Sonidos

Observ.

kueda

Fecha

Diciembre 13, 2014 a las 12:28 TARDE PST

Descripción

Living lancetooth, found under a log like all the other living snails we found.

Comentarios

I love this whole idea! Snails were one of my first animal loves as a little kid but I know shamefully little about identifying common species. I applaud you for trying to systematically document some in-depth natural history by downloading it from a naturalist's brain. I look forward to seeing more in the series!

Publicado por carrieseltzer hace más de 9 años

Amazing work!! I admit I don't usually pay attention to snails and slugs even in my own yard (Alligator Lizards help limit their number), but I will start cataloging and try identifying.

Publicado por patsimpson2000 hace más de 9 años

Thanks both of you! Yeah, my eyes are really being opened to their diversity, which is actually pretty significant in California, both among natives and introduced species. If you guys do find some snails to photograph, remember to get the three shots I've shown in the pics here: top, bottom, side.

Publicado por kueda hace más de 9 años

Thanks for the tip! Now that you pointed it out, I see that the side photo really helps distinguish the three species shown here.

Publicado por carrieseltzer hace más de 9 años

In these individuals it definitely did, but I've learned that trait can be a bit variable within Helminthoglypta, at least. Pilsbry's description of H. arrosa is good, and he says "the elevation of the spire varies more than usual." For Haplotrema it totally matters! They're practically flat.

Publicado por kueda hace más de 9 años

LOVE it.

Totally going to use the question introduced in #14 on my next nature walk when we look for snails.

"Would you rather be a slug or a snail?"

Great entry.

Publicado por sambiology hace más de 9 años

Hey Ken-ichi, I don't know if you've talked to Neil, but be sure to tell him that I did propose that question, "Would you rather be a slug or a snail?" to two groups of kiddos already. One group didn't really think about it too much, even after my prodding, but the other group discussed it quite a bit! It was great!

We flipped over some logs and watched a little Triodopsis sp.. :)

Publicado por sambiology hace más de 9 años

Nice! I'll let him know. I've sort of had this project on hold for a few weeks. Need to make some time for it.

Publicado por kueda hace más de 9 años

Thanks so much Ken-ichi, your shots are just perfect. This will really help people understand how to image a gastropod shell, making it easier for us to ID them!

Publicado por susanhewitt hace más de 9 años

Excellent! Inspires me to take a closer look at terrestrial snails.

Publicado por marknenadov hace alrededor de 9 años

More power to you Ken-ichi. This is a wonderful project!

Publicado por susanhewitt hace alrededor de 9 años

Really fun to listen to your recordings. Excited to be learning more about snails and glad to know how to photograph them better. Thanks much!

Publicado por direbecca hace más de 8 años

This seems like a cool series that could be done as a podcast.

Publicado por vermfly hace más de 8 años

It would be, but I basically gave up on it. Processing the audio is a lot of work, and I kind of lost enthusiasm for exploring a city I don't live in. I think it might work as something a bit less ambitious, e.g. just recording a single event with a knowledgeable person and editing that audio into an episode.

Publicado por kueda hace más de 8 años

Ideas come and go; nice work giving it a try! I bet it comes back in some shape and form!

Publicado por calloftheloon hace más de 7 años

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