New year, new semester, and we are all back in Gainesville. And we have already had visitors. Carole Marshall is here looking at our collection of specimens from the Lake Worth/Peanut Island area. She has been diligently photographing shells from our dry collection. We have over 3500 from that area so she has had her work cut out for her.

Harry Lee came back to reprise his role of expert IDer, this time applying his skills to the snail family Terebridae.

We realized that with these new IDs, this will probably be the next group slated for subsampling and plating. A little recon revealed that many of these specimens are small and/or tightly retracted. I think next time we might suggest to Gustav a nice slug family that we should subsample. Dorididae anyone? Well, small and retracted isn’t so bad right, at least they’re not bivalves, those might present a real challenge. Oh right…

We’ve been doing the bivalves. I was manning the photo station yesterday when Nat saw me photographing the lovely Lioconcha pictured above. What does its pattern remind you of? If you said “a phylogeny” then you might need to spend a little less time with Geneious (I’m looking at you Nat).

It’s true, we’re still hooked on Geneious. Below, Jenna is giving Nate an adamant lesson, but they both look pleased with his Geneious-learning acumen.

Now that the semester has started again, the Cuke Team will be reassembled. Julie was previously pictured doing some solo work on ossicle slides, but now she will have company. You last saw JD working with Jenna at Geneious, but that was merely in order to add to his skills as a Cuke Team member. Here he and Laura cuke it up, preparing still more ossicle slides of the sea cucumber family Synaptidae.

Also, Sarah is back from Moorea, but she just can’t seem to let go. She has spent much of her time lately compiling the field data into a spreadsheet that can be imported into the Biocode database. The massive collection effort in Moorea is part of the large, three-year Biocode project which aims to document the entire diversity of the island. All the data must be in exactly the right format and Sarah has spent countless hours staring at error messages trying to make it so. She seems so happy, it must be just like being back in the islands!

Art just got back from Ecuador, but I can tell that he was missing work while he was on vacation because he dove right back into drawing Alpheid details. Art has several new species that’s he’s in the process of describing for publication. It must be keeping him pretty busy because the packages arriving from Amazon.com have slowed to a trickle.

New for 2010, division uniform? Either that or Jenna, Sarah, and I are psychic. There’s no other possible explanation for the teal shirts we all decided to wear on the same day this week.

Happy New Year everyone!

🙂 Mandy