We Are Nature

A Real Good Slime

• Carnegie Museum of Natural History • Season 2 • Episode 7

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What would a snail scientist do with a blank check? What can we learn from snails and their kin? Why is the ocean getting more acidic, how do we know, and why does that matter? Featuring Tim Pearce, Curator of Mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Michael Pisano:

You're listening to the Anthropocene Archives, a presentation of We Are Nature. In this special series of stories, we're delving deep into Carnegie Museum of Natural History's 22 million collection items, raiding cabinets and cases, sifting through objects and organisms in search of stories of stewardship, solutions, and scientific wonder. On today's episode, Solidarity with the small and slimy, assisted mollusk migration, and some wisdom from slow-rolling role models. Today we're taking the scenic route. Let's escargot. Welcome to We Are Nature, a show about natural history and movable futures presented by Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I'm your host, amateur slime trail follower Michael Pisano, and today I'm joined by a prominent professional mollusk joke author. Would you just please introduce yourself?

Tim Pearce:

I'm Tim Pearce here at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I'm assistant curator of mollusks, and I take care of the shell collection.

Michael Pisano:

I am just so excited for you to join us today. We've also got a third guest who we'll maybe get to, a professional mollusk, maybe we could say. So thank you both for joining us today and taking us behind the scenes of the malacology collection here. To kick us off, could you tell me a little bit about the Carnegie's mollusk collections?

Tim Pearce:

Oh, right. So we've got a huge shell collection. Um it's been here for since 1895, I think. So that's what, 130 years? Are we there yet? And um it's the 10th or 11th largest shell collection in the United States. Oh wow. So that's pretty amazing. We've got we are particularly strong in land snails from the Appalachian area from the eastern United States. That makes sense. But we also are really strong in the freshwater mussels. The guy who literally wrote the book on them was a former curator, and we've got his collection.

Michael Pisano:

Lucky, lucky, lucky. What kind of species diversity are we talking about represented in the collection here?

Tim Pearce:

There might be maybe 80,000 species of molluscs in the world, and we have probably 18 to 20,000 species represented in our collection. There's no museum that has them all. Sure. And that's partly because some of them are just described from a single specimen. Incredible. That means one museum and only one museum can have that species. Period, right.

Michael Pisano:

What about locally? What's our biodiversity, our mollusk biodiversity like here?

Tim Pearce:

My specialty are the land snails. And so we have about 130 species of land snails in Pennsylvania. And we also have maybe 60 to 65 of the freshwater mussels and maybe 15 or 20 of the freshwater clams. Sorry, freshwater snails. Well, we do have a few of the tiny clams too. I'm not sure how many eight to ten species of those. Gotcha.

Michael Pisano:

Just to get right away into the things you've brought us, I wonder if maybe we can start with this very enticing one.

Mackenzie Kimmel:

Collection item one lives in a translucent plastic tub. Rich, moist soil fills the tub's bottom third. Moss, bark, and a sorted organic detritus is scattered across the surface, evoking a lonely forest floor. The collection item housed here is not one single organism, but rather a colony. Individuals range in size from heartbreakingly tiny youth to adults that measure an inch in diameter. Each of their friendly faces sports four tentacles. Each of their backs holds a spiral structure made of calcium carbonate adorned in white and orange stripes. Can you identify collection item one?

Tim Pearce:

Well, this is a tub. It's a plastic tub with a tight-fitting lid that has holes in the lid. And inside is some soil and some bark and some living snails. The common name for these is tiger snail. The Latin name is Anguispira alternata. And these are this is a colony that I've had for I think about 2013 or 2014. I collected in northern Michigan. But I think this species has lived in Frick Park, one of our local parks. And so I'm trying to get permission to release these and start the colony in Frick Park and maybe follow it to see how successful recolonizing Frick Park is.

Michael Pisano:

Can you tell me a little bit more about the organism? I mean, what what's a tiger snail's day like? What's their lifestyle?

Tim Pearce:

For the for your eyes only people, I don't know if you can see this, but there you can see the snail, it's a coil, and then out the bottom of it is this body, and it's just putting its eyes out there. Yeah. So it has four tentacles out the front. The two lower ones are for smelling and tasting, and these two upper ones have balls on the tips. Those are actually eyeballs. Yeah. And so it's got eyes on the tips of its upper tentacles. They don't have very good vision, so they probably couldn't tell you and me apart.

Michael Pisano:

No, that's okay.

Tim Pearce:

But they can tell light and dark.

Michael Pisano:

Okay, that seems more important as a foundation.

Tim Pearce:

And they are very good at smelling, so they could probably smell us apart.

Michael Pisano:

And what are they smelling for in their environment?

Tim Pearce:

Oh gosh, I don't know. Probably food, but maybe also mates. Sure, sure, sure, sure. It was possibly trying to stay away from predators, but I'm not sure that they would do much of that smelling.

Michael Pisano:

And when we're talking about food, what what are they eating? What's their diet like?

Tim Pearce:

That's a very interesting question because for almost all of the snails, we don't know what they eat. Oh, no kidding. We just make a guess that, oh, they're eating detritus, they're eating dead leaves. Um, and in most cases that's probably true. But then again, get even deeper, please. There's eating and then there's absorbing. So a lot of these creatures are eating a lot of things that just comes through, comes out the other end, looking pretty much like it went in. Okay. So then the question is, what are they actually, how are they staying alive?

Michael Pisano:

What are they taking out of that stream?

Tim Pearce:

And so we believe, again, this is a belief we don't we don't have the evidence yet, but we think that they're eating and absorbing the bacteria and the fungus that are growing on the they're helping to decompose the leaves. So the leaves themselves might not be contributing much nutrition. So have you heard of environmental DNA? Please. Oh, so environmental DNA is mostly used in water. Creatures that are living in the water are leaking DNA just through their slime, through their waste products or their gills. And so a person can take a sample of water and analyze it for the DNA and see which species are living there.

Speaker 3:

So awesome.

Tim Pearce:

So that's pretty cool. So one idea about trying to figure out what the snails are eating, I've tried to get some people interested in looking at the snail poo to see what DNA can we find in the poo to get an idea of what they're eating. So again, this doesn't get at what they're actually absorbing, but it will get at what they're eating at.

Michael Pisano:

What's coming in and coming out.

Tim Pearce:

So far, we haven't had much luck with the looking at the poo. One person that I did get to look at that found an awful lot of human DNA. And so the one conclusion could be they're eating humans, but the other conclusion is she had contaminated her sand. Right, right, right, right. That makes maybe more sense, but I wouldn't put anything here. I think that that's really fascinating that mollusks are the second largest phylum in the world. That's right. After Arthropods, for most of the mollusks, we don't know what they eat. That's incredible.

Michael Pisano:

One of the things I wanted to talk about with our tiger snails today was broadening out to the land snail kind of State of the Union, thinking about the Anthropocene, thinking about some of the other stories this season. I'm curious about kind of how they're doing these days.

Tim Pearce:

Well, so yes, I have been studying tiger snails for probably 10 years now. They are or have been the most common large land snail east of the Mississippi. And what that means is there are lots of specimens in museums. Right. Because people can find them and bring them in. And museums are amazing because they've got all of this information over time. Yes. And so it can tell you what was living where, when. And so I was looking at the museum and I was noticing, hey, we're finding fewer of them nowadays. And the museum allowed me to see, hey, they're doing pretty well, pretty well, pretty well. And so around 1960, they started to disappear in different places. And I've been, I'm I'm not finished with my studies yet, but I'm approaching it from two different angles. Okay. One is acid rain. Yep. And the mid-1960s is about when acid rain started going up. And so acid rain could have contributed to their decline. But then also global uh warming or climate warming. So if these snails are already living near the southern edge of their limit or living as low on the mountain as they can, if the climate then warms, then they have to move north or they have to move up the mountain. And some of these disappearances could be consistent with climate warming playing a role also. So I'm still I'm at the point I'm trying to tease out which, if either of those factors is causing this.

Michael Pisano:

I mean, I think they're both great working theories to start with. So, you know, I think for a snail to migrate, to imagine being at that scale, moving through a landscape, many, many challenges, and some that are more novel than others, perhaps. So maybe we could talk about human modification of the landscape and what that has done for snails trying to move to chase a climate or for other reasons.

Tim Pearce:

Absolutely, yeah, that's absolutely true. That um something that we just take for granted, you know, walking across the street, that can be a barrier for a snail. If a snail requires forest and we've got an agricultural field between this forest and that forest, it's really hard for the snail to get across. Right, right, right. So but but no, it's true. A path or a road can be a barrier to a snail migration. We've we've started to think about assisted migration. Yeah, well, if if the snail's living at the top of the mountain, there is no more up, but there's another mountain far, far away. We can carry them to the new mountain and uh and start a new colony there. So that's that's something that people are talking about. Sure. We need to do it carefully because we don't want to mess up existing ecology that's going on there.

Michael Pisano:

Yes, I think there's kind of a fraught history of well-intentioned, we picked something up and moved it over and put it somewhere else. Can you kind of speak to the open questions in that possibility? Because I a lot of episodes this season we've talked about the need to move from a passive idea of conservation where it's just you set aside the land and everything will flourish and everything will be fine, but rather we're at a point where maybe we need to be a little bit more active and participatory. Can you just kind of speak to how that uh affects this scenario?

Tim Pearce:

I think predictive modeling would be relevant here. So with predictive modeling, you look at where the species lives now, and you look at a bunch of variables like the climate and the rainfall and the temperature, maybe the habitat, what kind of vegetation it has, maybe the underlying rock type, those kinds of things. And then using all that information, you can predict other places that it might be found right right now. Um so you could go and look and test your test your hypothesis. But the power is you can also dial it forward and say, all right, right, in a in a climate warming world or uh with with modified rainfall, where might we predict it would be in the future? Right. And then you could say, do the existing reserves adequately protect this species, or would we need to move them, or would we need to make create new reserves? Sure.

Michael Pisano:

I am curious about other ways to maybe make space for safe snail passage, and you know, maybe thinking about that a little more broadly about more welcoming landscapes for the small and the vulnerable, right? Like maybe this is a good time to talk a little bit about the charisma of the snail, which I think you probably uh have some takes on, but you know, generally when we're talking about the undergrowth, the mud, the small things crawling around in them, it's not a typical definition of charisma. What do you find, you know, endearing, nice, exciting about these?

Tim Pearce:

I guess one of my favorite things about mollusks is that I can keep up with them. They're not too fast for me. Um, I just I just love them. They're um nice to be with. They uh they don't make a lot of noise. That's true. They're mellow, um, good role models.

Michael Pisano:

What can we learn from snails?

Tim Pearce:

Take it easy. Yeah. Take it easy. Enjoy the enjoy the scenery.

Michael Pisano:

Sure.

Tim Pearce:

Um, be friendly.

Michael Pisano:

All very good lessons, and yeah, not maybe not always worrying about growth or more. But uh, yes. I am curious, I guess, about, you know, it kind of an extension of this same question about charisma and what you see as, you know, not just endearing, but also valuable uh about these small creatures. Like how is the success of the land snail, let's say, defined very broadly, connected to human success.

Tim Pearce:

Right. On the charisma topic, I think most people don't find snails and slugs very charismatic. And I think that that's unfortunate because there are so many creatures in the world that are maybe less charismatic than things with big eyes.

Speaker 3:

That's right.

Tim Pearce:

In utilitarian terms, uh, they do perform a lot of functions for us. Okay. I mean, they help to chew up the leaves that fall down to return the nutrients to the soil, the plants can grow again. If if things didn't chew up the leaves, we'd be up to our neck or even deeper in leaves. Snails, land snails, are really important in the food web. They provide uh essential calcium to a lot of creatures and and food. I mean, think about birds. Mother birds are laying eggs coated with a shell of calcium carbonate. Right. And she gets it from eating the snail shells. Wow. And and fireflies, baby fireflies, eat snails, sometimes nothing but snails. So if you love fireflies, and we all do, let's not so well, then you've got to love snails. So yeah, they do play really important roles in the ecosystem. Snails and other less charismatic creatures. So we do need to appreciate them.

Michael Pisano:

I do appreciate that you kind of set out this ecosystem services, you know, version of this. What are they doing for the ecology for us? But I think you're also hinting at, and maybe this is just me reaching, you know, an inherent value. I I guess for me, you know, I grew up as a certified bug nerd, right? And I loved a lot of things that many people didn't really see as charismatic. And it wasn't because I was aware of all the important roles they play in an ecosystem, it's because of just something special about them. And I, you know, I kind of see the same spark in your eyes when you look at our tiger snails here. I am kind of curious about what you think happens, you know, culturally, let's say, in a human world where we learn to look past that charismatic megafauna system of conservation or of narrative, really, right? Because of course, to protect a whale, you're protecting habitat, which maybe protects the snails that are in the habitat to some degree, but it's, you know, the poster child is the poster child. It doesn't escape me, I guess, that, you know, like you said, the species have big human eyes that you can kind of read in a an emotion into. They feel very human. So we're we're relating to another organism. But what happens, you know, kind of culturally for us when we can say, actually, there's value to that which is foreign that does not look like us, that is small, vulnerable, squishy, slimy.

Tim Pearce:

I I completely agree. I'm not sure what else to add. Um I you know, you could you could talk at it from a religious perspective. Sure. So almost all the religions of the world say we should be stewards. Sure. And so it's it's really our obligation to take care of creation, and these are part of creation. Sure. I don't know, every living creature is worthy of respect. On the charisma idea, it's not just the big eyes that are charismatic. Yeah, tell me more. Butterflies are charismatic too.

Michael Pisano:

That's true. Why? Why do you think that is?

Tim Pearce:

We love color color and we love movement.

Michael Pisano:

And I think they are associated with flowers and with beautiful, you know, beautiful kind of landscapes that we can create. Not necessarily, you know, a garden, right, is a very controlled piece of nature to say, ooh, beautiful. But for now, I'd like to move on to this other uh collection item you've brought.

Mackenzie Kimmel:

Collection item two splits into two halves, a top and a bottom that interlock neatly the satisfying. The exterior of both halves is mottled white and gray and covered in wavy organic ridges that suggest an accretion of layers over time. The interior of the halves is luminous bright white and smooth, with one small patch of ruddy color on each face. The whole collection item fits comfortably into the curve of a hand. What is collection item two?

Tim Pearce:

I've brought along an oyster. It's actually a bivalve, so it looks like a clam, but this particular one, a very misshapen clam. So it's not at all regular, and it would be hard to describe how it's misshapen. It looks kind of like a leaf, maybe. But it has the two halves, and the two halves fit together very nicely. And um, interestingly, on the inside, it's got one patch of color on each of the shells. That's actually the muscle scar. And so these uh these oysters have one muscle, and when it wants to close, then it will pull its muscles shut and close the shell. Most clams have two muscles, but the oysters and many other uh mollusks have just one. Scallops also have just one muscle scar.

Michael Pisano:

Okay, tell me about this specimen. Where where is this from?

Tim Pearce:

This one is um this is a Northern Europe species. Okay, okay. Um this one is Neopicnodonti cochlear. Cochlear refers to ear. Neo is new and Pycnodonti, I'm not sure what that means. Um, but these would be eaten in northern Europe.

Michael Pisano:

Gotcha. And aside from eating uh oysters, you know, I think we would be remiss in not talking about oysters kind of incredible ecosystem services bit. What what do they do for the ecology around them?

Tim Pearce:

I I'll probably uh fail to tell you something, but they do an awful lot. One of them is that they do clean a lot of the water. So they're filtering a lot of uh food particles out of the water. So they're using their gills for breathing, but also for eating. And so as the food particles go over the gills, the little cilia is sending the food one way toward the mouth and the non-food somewhere else. And so it actually gets bound up into little strings. So they're cleaning debris out of the water. Another thing that they're doing is they are they're building reefs with their shells. So their their shells, after they finish living, they might die. But then over time it builds up this these huge reefs, which are really important wave breaks. They help to protect us from hurricanes and huge waves. And then they also provide habitat for the new oysters to settle on. There actually has been a problem because humans have been harvesting oysters for so many years and piling them up on the shore. And so then the reeves.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I like it.

Tim Pearce:

The reefs have been disappearing and it's not providing substrate for new baby oysters to live. So there's been a lot of effort to build new reefs out there on the on the seashore. And uh so they've been getting sometimes artificial structures, but sometimes they've just been getting oyster shells and putting them out there. And so, yeah, they're coming back really, really successfully. It's a real success story.

Michael Pisano:

I also understand there's a more local success story with freshwater uh mussels that is maybe uh something you could speak to because I I do love a local story. Uh I guess what I'm really getting for is like Clean Water Act and the way that maybe diversity had gone down to a an almost zero in some of the rivers around here. And can you speak to that kind of uh um local part?

Tim Pearce:

Yeah, when you when you first said success story, I wasn't sure which one. Um but yes, right here in in Pittsburgh proper, uh the water quality was really bad. And so they probably perished because of the bad water quality. But in many other parts of the eastern United States, um it hasn't been water quality so much, but siltation. So by by building dams, we turn flowing rivers into lakes, and that changes which species can live there. Down in the Tennessee Valley Authority, they channelized and straightened out a lot of rivers, which took away a lot of the habitat. So the siltation and the channel and the habitat change that really dated a lot of the clams. But they're starting to undo some of that and they're coming back. But yeah, in Pittsburgh, cleaning up the water did allow the fish to return. So there's this bizarre life cycle of the fish.

Speaker 3:

Oh, tell me, I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim Pearce:

So the freshwater mussels, um, they're they actually are parasites on fish for a couple of weeks as larvae. So the females of these freshwater mussels, they're doing triple duty with their gills. They're breathing with their gills, they're eating with their gills, and they keep their babies in their gills. Incredible. Triple duty, amazing. So they hold the babies in over the winter, and then when it's in the springtime, they wait until there's a fish nearby and squeeze out some babies, and they're little tiny, tiny things with little hooks, and they grab onto the fish's gills or their fins, and then they suck the fish's juices for a few weeks until they metamorphose and fall off. And in the in the process, the fish has moved them to new areas. The fish is the rapid transit for the for these mussels to find new areas to live. So when the water quality was really bad, it was bad for the fish too. Right. But now fish are moving back in and the mussels are moving back in. And in fact, some species of mussels have moved back in that weren't here before. Incredible. Um not invasion, they've just been able to migrate further upstream. So, yes, it is a success story.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah. Um, not to turn us towards an ongoing, not great story, but I would like to talk a little bit about um problems in, I think, well, I'll I'll I'll let you tell me exactly how widespread this is, but there's an issue of acidification that's impacting creatures with shells like this.

Tim Pearce:

In freshwaters, there's acid mine drainage, and that's wreaking havoc with all sorts of things. But no, in the ocean, that one is more directly related to um carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So when you have more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, then more of it dissolves in the water, and then that makes carbonic acid, which makes the ocean more acidic. So for creatures that are building shells out of calcium carbonate, more acidic water, makes it more difficult to build them and more difficult to keep them. They will actually dissolve. So this is causing a lot of problems for a bunch of mollusks, and with the oysters in particular, you know, a lot of the oysters we eat are coming from oyster farms, and the farmers there actually buy baby oysters. It's called spat. They buy the baby oysters and bring them in and then they plant them in their farms. Well, the baby spat, the baby oysters are really sensitive to this ocean acidification, and farmers are having a lot of difficulty. So they actually have to measure the pH of the water before they plant their oysters, or else they might all die. Wow. So that that's making it difficult for the oyster farm. And for you, if you like to eat raw oysters.

Michael Pisano:

Sure. Well, and I think probably more broadly in the ecology, can you kind of speak to what this acidification is doing? You know, not in too much detail, but it's not just a problem, I imagine, for creatures with shells like this.

Tim Pearce:

But well, so right, a lot of creatures are having difficulty building their shells, and the pteropods are microscopic. Well, some of them are bigger than microscopic, but they're small snails, actually, that spend their whole life in the plankton, floating in the plankton, float around in the currents, and they are really important in the food web. Lots of creatures are eating them from other plankton, fishes, and even whales, the baline whales are eating these teropods. By the way, terrapod is spelled with a P. And the joke is you cannot hear them going to the bathroom because the P is silent. So pteropods are really important in the food web. Yes, but they're also really susceptible to this ocean acidification. And some of them, their shells are dissolving, it's more difficult for them to grow them and to keep them. And we don't know what that's what's going to happen. Sure. And what what will the decline of pteropods do to the food web? It's a really good question. You know, if all these creatures are depending on, and it's a large fraction of their food, so we don't know. But it's potentially bad things.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, I mean, I'm reminded to bring this back to my comfort zone of insects and the idea of their population declines, biodiversity declines that we're seeing terrestrially now. And it is this huge unknown that I think makes a lot of people very nervous when they learn about it. I certainly, yeah, was feeling uh a little hopeless, I would even say, when this beautifully diverse group of creatures that I grew up with thinking of as they're, you know, ubiquitous and kind of unstoppably teeming all around, you know, when those are in trouble and when it seems like it's going to have such an impact as this foundation falls out from underneath food webs or other parts of topology. That's right, insectigedon some sense. Insectigetton. Like, how do we orient conservation and maybe conservation narratives as well to target those losses that we're seeing of these small creatures?

Tim Pearce:

Well, for the for the insects, I think you need to under we need to understand what the issue is. You know, is it the is it the pesticides or you know what is causing it? And then we can address it. For the terrapods, I think we know it's ocean acidification. So we need to stop driving our cars so much. Or we need to drive electric cars more.

Michael Pisano:

Sure. So I mean there is this individual kind of scale action, right? Of, you know, at a cultural level, we have to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels and these things that are putting more carbon into the air, which is making the ocean more acidic. But what about, you know, I wonder what you think about at larger scales, at community scales, policy scales. Is there any sort of conservation effort that you would like to see?

Tim Pearce:

Oh my goodness, are you giving me the million-dollar check question?

Michael Pisano:

Yeah.

Tim Pearce:

If I had million dollars, how would I change politics? Get in there. Tell us about it. I would put more scientists in politics. Sure. Except I'm a scientist and I don't want to be a politician.

Michael Pisano:

That's okay. Well, I think that's therein lies part of the cultural issue, right? Is that politics seems like kind of a bad uh pursuit.

Tim Pearce:

I want politicians to know more science. I think that that would. I mean, if if politicians understood science, they would understand what the issue is and why they need to act in a certain way. I guess that's what I would do with my million dollars. Okay.

Michael Pisano:

Well, you might have a little left over. So is there anything else you might do? Uh, you know, I think so there's there's like a science literacy question that you have have brought up. Um is there any kind of specific uh policy that you think would be helpful when we're talking specifically about acidification? Like, are there any other things we can do to mitigate? Because it's it's I think my my understanding about change um in our time, uh like system change is that it is varied in its approach. There's local thrusts, there's activism, there's politics and policy, right? There's kind of an ecosystem that's required to make change. So, what else kind of fits into that for you uh when we're talking about conserving? And I'll open it up to kind of mollusk biodiversity, mollusk health.

Tim Pearce:

Two avenues. Two one I would I would say, yeah, more funding for research. Just basic research. Like I said, we don't even know what most of them eat. That's true. And there's you know, there's just so many, especially tiny species, those are the ones that really make me happy. I think the average land snail is about an eighth of an inch. Wow, so we. Three millimeters. You know, that means half the species are smaller than that.

unknown:

Wow.

Tim Pearce:

So that's one avenue. And then I think on a practical level, I think we really do need to get the the carbon suckers, things that will bring the carbon out of the atmosphere. I mean, trees are doing it for free if we would stop cutting them down. Sure. Um, but I mean, one crazy idea. Yeah, well carbon dioxide actually freezes. So carbon dioxide goes from gas to solid without going through a liquid. Okay.

Speaker 3:

Yep.

Tim Pearce:

And carbon dioxide freezes at a higher temperature than nitrogen and oxygen, which is the bulk of our air. So if we could just make the air cold enough, really cold, we would get carbon dioxide snow. And I mean, it's it's not, I mean, yes, it's cold. It would take a lot of energy to get down there. So I propose to go to some place that's already cold. Okay. Like Antarctica. Sure, it's cold. And build these big factories that would bring air in, make it cold, and the carbon dioxide would snow out, and then bring in some more, and it would snow out, and then you'd collect all this carbon dioxide.

Michael Pisano:

That was my next question. What do you do with the snow?

Tim Pearce:

Okay, well, now it gets even crazier.

Michael Pisano:

Okay, great.

Tim Pearce:

Well, diamonds are just compressed carbon. So you take all this carbon dioxide snow, compress it into diamonds, and then sell the diamonds to fund the operation. I love it.

Michael Pisano:

It's circular, so that's something.

Tim Pearce:

I have a feeling it would not be economically feasible, but still it's a cool idea. It is.

Michael Pisano:

I love hearing ideas like that. And I guess my feeling is like, of course, there's an element of fantasy, and there's a lot of things that would have to work out for that to, you know, realistically work out. But what is the kind of value of thinking big and thinking outside of kind of the normal constraints? Because, you know, I think one thing you mentioned within that to me was there were two kind of instances where you said, oh, this is my million dollars, you know, that I get to spend my if money's no object, and you also said, well, economically it wouldn't be very feasible. But when kind of the future of the planet is on the line, what are economics? What is the point of economics? Is it to you know consolidate wealth? That's another whole conversation, or is it to create a livable space for all of us? Or, you know, just just I wonder what your kind of thoughts are on the state of like imaginative thinking within the constraints uh that we find ourselves in and this challenge.

Tim Pearce:

I think that humans have a discontent gene.

Michael Pisano:

Okay, I'm listening.

Tim Pearce:

I'm not content with the way that things are. I'm gonna invent something and make it better. And then we're not content with that, and we want to make it better. And so this non-content gene forces us into progress. Sure. Which, you know, don't get me wrong, yeah, I'm actually enjoying my life. Right. But I'm wondering, is that really for the better?

Speaker 3:

Right.

Tim Pearce:

You know, there's lots of other creatures out there that are doing just fine and they don't have this discontent gene in their head. Is it better to have more stuff? Is it better to have more control over the world, or is it better to be happy with what you have?

Michael Pisano:

I think we're coming back to some lessons that snails can give us, right? About contentedness, but also the pace of things, right? I think what you're saying reminds me of things that I have read uh and said probably at parties about growth versus degrowth as a kind of model for the economy and for the point of um endeavor, let's say. Uh like moonshot, right, as like a kind of concept is you know, the idea that something is very challenging, but if we come together and a lot of people lend their varied expertises, a lot of things are possible. You can get to the moon. Can you talk about kind of some of the role that you think science can play, the kind of science that you do, and that you would hope, you know, people coming into careers in science might contribute towards solving some of these problems of our age for snails, for people, for the planet?

Tim Pearce:

Just in one sentence, if we don't do it, it's going to be done to us. And and we are smart, we can see what's happening, we can see the solution, we can choose to do it, or it will be done to us.

Michael Pisano:

I love uh I love having an active role in you know, some way in playing out uh my future and the future of the people I love and the places that I care about. So I accept. How would you suggest people get involved in supporting mollusks, their local snail populations? What could you do to be a better neighbor to the mollusks in your neighborhood?

Tim Pearce:

Well, so earlier when we were talking about migration, sure, you didn't use the word corridor, but you could have used the word corridor. Because corridors, I mean, corridors are recognized as important for large mammals to migrate between habitat, sections, areas of habitat. Um, but it's also true for mollusks too. So if you had continuous forest between these two areas, then the mollusk could slowly under its own power, the mollusk could actually migrate.

Speaker 3:

But where's the rush?

Tim Pearce:

Where's the rush? But yes. Um, corridors actually are important. But then I don't want to say forests are the only thing because there are mollusks who also live in open areas. And so there, you know, they might be in a limestone area, and it's not nothing to do with humans. That's just the landscape. This is a limestone hill, and there's a limestone hill. Yeah. How do they get from one to the other? But uh no, so corridors and providing habitat for mollusks is probably a good idea. I was downtown last night and it's pretty sterile. Concrete, um, there are some plantings here and there, but not a lot of mollusks.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Tim Pearce:

So providing good natural habitat is good in your own yard. You probably have non-native species, but you know, you get philosophical about do we welcome non-native species into our yards or not? Um you can try to welcome, I mean, I'm battling the slugs right now. But um we can try to welcome the the slugs and and have you know some sort of natural garden, or at least a part of your yard might have some bushes rather than just mown lawn. Although mown lawn also has snails in it. Um so yes, welcome welcome diversity, welcome nature, and and appreciate it.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, yeah, on that appreciation note, maybe this can kind of take us out. I I wonder, you know, maybe it's an obvious question, but I think you might have a good answer to it anyway. Um what is you know the value of inviting diversity into your life in in this biological sense, maybe more broadly if we're still feeling philosophical. But you know, why should the city not be a sterile environment? Why should your yard uh have habitat? Why should you go out of your way to, you know, put a little bit of something out for the slugs?

Tim Pearce:

Well, that's it's tough because you know it is it's nice to have tidiness. It's nice to have, it's nice not to have bugs in your house. You know, they are part of they're part of creation, but they're part of the diversity. Diversity is what makes the world go round. Who are we to exclude them?

Michael Pisano:

That's a great question. I think there's plenty of benefits to just the simple act of uh like hanging out with some snails. And so I really appreciate you bringing these friends by for today. Uh is there any oh actually, you know what? I would be probably remiss in my hosting duties if I didn't ask you to uh close us out on maybe one more of your favorite jokes.

Tim Pearce:

Barack Obama Halloween's coming up, Barack Obama went to a Halloween party giving his wife a piggyback ride. Okay. And the host said, Welcome, Mr. President. Um, what are you dressed up as? And Barack said, I'm a snail. This is Michelle on my back.

Michael Pisano:

That's very good. Thank you again so much for joining me.

Tim Pearce:

It's been great. Thank you.

Michael Pisano:

20,000 thanks to Tim for inviting us into the Carnegie's Malacology collection, and to the 20,000 mollusks therein for reminding us to slow down, take it easy, and enjoy the scenery. DJ Thermos makes the music, Mackenzie Kimmel describes the collection items, and Garrick Schmidt and Michael Pizzano, that's me, edit the podcast. Thanks for listening.