With the assistance of the FLMNH Natural History Travel Award, I was able to attend the American Society of Mammalogists (ASM) annual meeting that was held in Boulder CO, June 7-11 2024. At this meeting, I gave oral presentation that expanded upon the research I first presented last year as a poster at the ASM meetings (also funded by the FLMNH awards committee). The title of my presentation was “How many species of short-tailed shrews (Blarina) are in Florida? Emphasis on Sherman’s short-tailed shrew.” I was presenting on the on-going research we are doing on Sherman’s short-tailed shrew, a small insectivore mammal that is endemic to southwest Florida but has not been captured since it was first described in 1954. Along with expanded genetic analyses on historical museum samples that was preliminarily presented on last year in a poster at ASM, we also incorporated morphological data, using cranial and mandible measurements along with external measurement data and mass (when recorded). Our research was able to show that despite Sherman’s short-tailed shrew initially being described on the basis of being larger than its congeners, it is in fact not really substantially larger and that there is a general trend of shrews increasing in size as you move south in latitude. Nor does it seem to be genetically distinct from other nearby shrew species, calling into doubt that it is a valid species.
Alongside with my research presentation, I also attended and presented at a workshop hosted by iDigBio called “Digital Collections Data & Tracking Disease.” At this workshop, I presented on a project I was a collaborator on, helmed by Carla Mavian in the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute. This project, “Virome Composition in Fresh Bat Guano, Frozen Bats, and Fluid-Preserved Bats”, was one we started in 2020 that looked to use fluid-preserve bats as a way to detect viruses over space and time, over different preservation methods (i.e., formalin-fixed vs. ethanol-fixed). It was expanded to use guano and freshly caught bats to look for current virome prevalence. Ultimately the team did not have much luck isolating viruses from the historical specimens (pointing to the challenges when working with older samples or unknown preservation histories) although they were able to isolate some coronaviruses and astroviruses from the fresh, frozen bats. This workshop will be made public in Zenodo and the participants will be working on a collaborative paper on the challenges and future of using museum collections to track disease data both in the past and in the future.
Outside of my presentations, attending ASM allowed me to take behind the scenes tours of both the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the University of Colorado Natural History Museum, which were offered to participants of the meeting. They were both interesting tours, and I always appreciate the opportunity to see how other natural history collections approach their storage, space, and general curation issues. I always come away with new ideas or inspiration on how to improve things in our own mammal collection.
I am the chair of the ASM Public Education Committee as well as a member of both the Biodiversity Committee and the Program Committee. While attending ASM, it was great to catch up with the committee members and talk about future progress and directions for all those committees.
I am very grateful for the Natural History Travel Awards committee for helping me attend ASM, as it is a meeting I look forward to every year and have been attending now for over 20 years!
Verity Mathis is a Collection Manager of Mammalogy at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
The 2024 Summer CMSS Travel Awards are supported by the FLMNH Department of Natural History, including funds from the Hoyt and Marta Whipple Biodiversity Fund, the Lawrence Dean Harris and Kathleen A. Deagan Endowment, and the Mary Ross Endowment. If you would like to help support this fund for future CMSS awards, please go to:
Mary Ross Endowment