For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working around the lab unpacking, organizing, and preparing the Panama specimens. I’ve been organizing the PCP-PIRE cabinets into the specific level of preparedness, whether the specimens need to be washed, identified, and have localities added, all the way to if they just need their identification to be checked.

This past week I’ve been working on putting together several shells from the Caribbean.

These are fun projects to work on because they are puzzles with very visible and tangible results.

To start I washed the shells to make sure they were cleaned then after they had dried in the drying oven I started working on putting them back together.I slowly combined the pieces that worked adding more and more chunks until the shell was complete. There were several other shells that I also put together along with the large one.

The larger shell took longer to put together because the glue wouldn’t set up and hold the pieces together. In order to make sure it would continue to hold together I put B-72 over the entire shell.