why you should sweat the small stuff

Anders and I at the banquet of the World Congress of Malacology this summer, wonderful conference, more on that later!

Well for one, when it comes to benthic marine samples, animals smaller than 2.5 mm make up most of the catch according to Anders Warén, and coming from a man who’s been on countless research cruises and participated in over a thousand dredge hauls, I’m inclined to take what he says quite seriously.  The sad thing is that most researchers throw out this precious (and almost always partially unknown) diversity with their salty bathwater after picking out the specimens you can see with the naked eye. As someone who chose to work on a small sized group of animals for my dissertation because of

the infamous binders – these are filled with photos of snails and radulae and other information and I believe have traveled the world with Anders as valuable references on research cruises (now luckily he has a laptop).

the fascinating way in which they have adapted to live their lives, I already appreciated them to some degree. But even after only a few days of sorting through samples in the company of one of the world’s experts on small molluscs, my appreciation has grown immensely for the care, attention to detail, and love of the natural world’s tiny curiosities that is required to learn all that we can from these little beasts.