2011 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA UNIFIED MALACOLOGISTS MEETING (SCUM) MEETING
Southern California Coastal Water Research Project
3535 Harbor Blvd., Suite 110
Costa Mesa, CA
Directions: http://www.sccwrp.org/ContactUs/Directions.aspx
Saturday, January 22, 2011
9:00 AM to 9:30 AM - Meet & Greet (coffee and donuts)
9:30 AM to 12:00 PM - Introductions & Presentations
12:00 PM to 1:00 PM - Lunch (menu TBD)
1:00 PM to 3:30 PM - Presentations continued
For more information contact: Kelvin Barwick, kbarwick@ocsd.org; (714-593-7475)
I plan on presenting a short talk on my work in the Carrizo Plain and Salinas Valley using mollusk to determine offset of the San Andreas fault since the latest Miocene. Many more talks and likely some more interesting will be presented - I know hard to believe. Its free, interesting, and usually lots of fun. Come and join us.
North of Bering Strait and west of Point Barrow, Alaska, lies the Chukchi Sea - home to a mix of north and west Pacific, circumboreal and Arctic marine fauna. Offshore are areas designated as possible oil lease areas, and the shallow, epicontinental sea is home to ice-dependent marine mammals, migratory whales, and birds including shearwaters, fulomars, and eiders. Small Inupiat communities depend on these resources for food and cultural identity. In August I was invited to participate in sampling to support environmental assessment of the nearshore habitats between Point Hope and Point Lay.
The jumping off point for this expedition to the Chukchi Sea is Nome on the Seward Peninsula. Getting there from Fairbanks in the Alaskan interior requires a flight first south to Anchorage then north and west to Nome. At the small crowded Nome airport, I joined the scientific party, and loaded supplies and personal gear onto a couple pickups, then we drove off through fog and drizzle to the small harbor. We met the crew of the Noresman II and settled in. During the 30 hour transit from Nome to the first sampling station, our scientific party of 10 and crew of six got acquainted, ran through drills, and refined our sampling protocols, for physical oceanographic conditions and water quality, plankton, fishes, and benthic invertebrates. My role, along with Roger Clark, was to identify benthic invertebrates, to count and weigh the catch from the beam trawl sampling.
We were favored by relatively mild temperatures and calm seas. Because of these favorable conditions, we completed three sampling stations in a 10- 12 hour day before steaming to the next day’s starting point.
The benthic invertebrate life a mix of species at their northernmost geographical range, species best known form the west Pacific, and Arctic fauna. We sorted large catches of seastars, shrimps, and ascidians as well as numerous gastropods. The Beringian area of which the Chukchi is the northwestern extent, is possibly the center for the evolution and dispersal of north Pacific Conidae- all those confusing Oenopota etc., also Buccinidae: Buccinum, Colus, Neptunea, Plicifusus, and so on. Velutina and Onchidiopsis, which are generally poorly known were encountered. In addition, we found five nudibranchs, a large red-mottled Dendronotus, a Flabellina, two Arctic species Calycidoris guentheri, and Acanthodoris pilosa. I was working with the epifauna, so bivalves seldom showed up in the catch from the beam trawl. Bivalves are mainly collected as infauna samples taken with a van veen grab.
Next year the project will continue exploring the Arctic nearshore as for as Point Barrow. Meanwhile, I’m identifying voucher specimens of rare or problematic species.
Nora Foster
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The 76th Annual Meeting of the American Malacological Society
The 43rd Annual Meeting of the Western Society of Malacologists
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26-30 June 2010, San Diego, CA
AMS/WSM 2010
*** Submission Deadline: 3 May 2010 ***
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http://www.malacological.org/meetings
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Call for Abstracts
As the current Presidents of AMS and WSM, it is our pleasure to announce the upcoming joint 76th Annual Meeting of the American Malacological Society and 43rd Annual Meeting of the Western Society of Malacologists to be held on the campus of San Diego State University (http://as.sdsu.edu/aztec/forms/SDSU_Campus_Map-Parking.pdf) in San Diego, California. The meeting will kick off in style with a welcome reception on the evening of Saturday, June 26th, with scientific sessions held from Sunday (June 27th) to noon on Wednesday (June 30th). Stay the following day, Thursday, July 1st, for organized or informal excursions in the San Diego area.
Venue. - We are fortunate to have reserved our meeting site at San Diego State University. The new SDSU Aztec Conference Center is attractive and easily accessible by car or via public transportation. SDSU has both new suites and somewhat less expensive older dorms, but both are affordable. We have negotiated a great rate for on-campus residents that includes all meals in a modern dining cafeteria. It is very nice! We encourage meeting attendees to select this option in order to promote interactions between meeting participants, but there are also many hotels within fairly close proximity of the meeting site, and non-resident attendees can choose whether to purchase an optional lunch plan during registration, or to plan to forage on their own in a variety of other restaurants or fast food options near the conference center. Public transit options include a new trolley stop, which is immediately adjacent to the conference center or a brief walk across a footbridge from the dorms. The trolley connects directly to the downtown train station and airport (search in Google maps for SDSU Transit Center, San Diego), and provides easy access to the outstanding selection of restaurants and bars in famous Old Town, and in the Gaslamp Quarter in downtown San Diego, about 29 minutes by trolley. The meeting will be affordable for students and close to world-class ocean beaches and other well known attractions that make San Diego such a popular destination to visit.
Sessions. - Scientific sessions are historically great at joint AMS/WSM West Coast meetings.--Dr. Peter Marko (Assistant Professor, Clemson University) and Dr. Alan Kohn (Professor Emeritus, University of Washington) are organizing an AMS-sponsored symposium on "Biogeography of the Pacific." An impressive line-up of speakers has been confirmed, and these include Dr. Thomas Duda, Dr. Suzanne Williams, Dr. Christine Parent, Dr. Cynthia Trowbridge, Dr. David Jacobs, and Dr. Alan Kohn. These leading scientists have agreed to present their research on Pacific molluscan biogeography on June 29. This symposium and associated contributed paper and poster sessions are expected to be a memorable highlight of the meeting. Please check the corresponding box on the abstract submission form if you would like to present a contributed paper or poster in a session associated with this symposium.
--Dr. Jennifer Burnaford (Assistant Professor, Cal State Fullerton) is organizing a complementary special session on invasive molluscs, for which about eight speakers have already been confirmed. Please check the corresponding box on the abstract submission form if you would like to present a contributed paper in this session.
--Dr. Eric Gonzales (Postdoctoral Researcher, UC Berkeley) will present a timely Student Workshop, "Genomic Tools for Molluscan Ecology and Evolution."
--Lindsey Groves (Dept. Malacology, LACMNH) will be organizing a session on Molluscan Paleontology 2010. Papers with a paleobiogeographic emphasis are particularly encouraged. Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic are all welcome.
--Further details will be on the meeting website very soon at: http://www.malacological.org/meetings/
Other events include ever-popular auction, banquet, reprint sales, and other fun activities. Please plan to attend and spread the word. Contact us if you would like to ship donations for the auction. Help us to make this joint meeting a success by planning to attend, responding when the call for contributed talks and posters is announced, getting involved, and especially encouraging students and colleagues, including those from Latin American countries, to participate. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the meeting organizers, Doug Eernisse at deernisse@fullerton.edu for AMS or George Kennedy at gkennedy@bfsa-ca.com for WSM.
See you in San Diego!
WESTERN SOCIETY OF MALACOLOGISTS & AMERICAN MALACOLOGICAL SOCIETY JOINT MEETING
June 26th – 30th 2010
Molluscan Paleontology 2010
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS/POSTERS
Molluscan Paleontology 2010 will be held on Monday, June 28th as part of the Joint Annual Meeting of the Western Society of Malacologists (43rd) and the American Malacological Society (76th ) at San Diego State University. Abstracts should be no longer than a single page, and talks should be limited to 15 minutes with 5 minutes for questions. All abstracts, extended abstracts, and papers will be published in the Annual Report of the WSM. Papers dealing with paleo-biogeography are especially welcome. Please send abstracts to session chairman Lindsey T. Groves, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Malacology Section [ lgroves@nhm.org ] by Friday, May 7, 2010. See http://biology.fullerton.edu/orgs/wsm/conferences.html [WSM] or http://www.malacological.org/meetings/ [AMS] for additional meeting details.
See you in San Diego!
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