Malacology

My name is Doctor Isabel Hyman, and I'm a research scientist here in malacology. Malacology is the study of molluscs.

So molluscs are the second biggest phylum, with over 100,000 species.

The phylum mollusca is made up of eight major groups.

First base of gastropods, which is the largest group.

They're the slugs and snails. Then there's the cephalopods, the octopus and squids.

Bivalves, which are clams, and all of those groups with two shells.

Polyplacophorins are the chitons, which have eight little plates across the back monoplacophora, aplaonoplacophora which is made up of two different groups and then scaphapods.

It seems a little bit odd that something like an octopus and a snail might be included in the same phylum, since they're so different.

So it's actually based on anatomical similarities, and they all share a number of characteristics.

So for example, they all have a foot which is used for creeping or digging or burrowing.

They all have a soft body covered by a mantle which secretes a shell or some sort of exoskeleton.

And the majority of groups have a radula. This is like a little ribbon covered in rows of teeth, and it's used for rasping, you know, or for feeding.

And so they're the characteristics that unite them.

Actually, originally in the study of molluscs, only the octopus and squid were included within the molluscs.

And the other groups with shells were considered to be a different group.

But once anatomical studies were advanced enough, they realized that they all should be included within the mollusca.

And that's when the term macology was coined.

So a lot of people ask us why snails?

Why molluscs?  You know, why are they important.

I think the important thing to know is that they play a really important part in the ecosystem.

They're part of the food web. Other animals eat them.

We have carnivorous species that eat other animals.

We have species that are really important indicators of habitat quality.

So freshwater snails are a really good indicators of the health of the freshwater stream.

So for all those reasons, they're very important.

We have a number of different research projects going.

A lot of our work is focused on descriptions of new species, and we also have quite a lot of conservation projects ongoing, as well as work on things like the 2019 2020 bushfires, which had a big impact on Australian species as well.

My name is Frank Kohler and I'm a research scientist at the Malacology Collection of the Australian Museum.

The Malacology Collection is the second biggest of the museum, and at least of the natural history collections.

We estimate that we have about 4 million specimens in our collection,

which can be both dry as we are here in the dry collection, or they can be wet, so that preserved specimens that are usually preserved in ethanol or in formalin.

Our collections are time capsules. They give you an idea of where species have been found in the past, because what we keep is a record of the place of the specimen and the time when it was collected.

And that allows us, for instance, to track changes in distributions of species.

So when we talk about climate change, museum collections are critical to actually provide the evidence that things are moving.

For instance, species from further north push further south.

And we can show that based on our record also changes in abundance. So at things that may have been very common, but now we know they're very rare.

This is what the museum is there for.

And that's why we keep specimens. It's a repository of knowledge. We can learn something about biodiversity.

And we definitely need to understand biodiversity much better than we do.

Molluscs are an important part of the biosphere.

They are not the only one, but understanding the distribution of molluscs and how they far in times of global change is one big piece of the puzzle that we try to solve.

The most common question we get asked is just simply why snails?

And sometimes it's really a bit of a tone of, why snails? And sometimes this is more, you know, bemusement.

Like, there are so many things you could work on koalas if you wanted to. Why would you choose snails?

I think a lot of people are grossed out by maybe invertebrates in general, but snails, because they're slimy and maybe they considered to be disgusting.

I think we need to learn to get over that. And discover how fascinating they are.

There's just such a huge diversity in the world of molluscs.

They're also very beautiful and so much that still unknown.

There's still thousands of undescribed species that we've got there to discover still.

And there's a lot that they can teach us as well.