Snails and their shells: Capstone research in the Burke Museum’s shell collection

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Walk along any beach, and you’re likely to find snail shells dotting the sand. Sea snails are a very large and diverse group of marine organisms, slow-moving with a shell covering their bodies, pretty similar to the ones we find on land. In the Bering Sea, located in the North Pacific Ocean and bordering Alaska and eastern Siberia, more than 200 species of sea snails exist. They’re an important source of prey for fish and walruses, playing a vital part in the Bering Sea food web.

One large shell, brown/yellow in color, sitting in a white container
Jasper Nevis
Beringius undatus is a large sea snail species in the genus Beringius.

Working with a 50-year-old shell collection sourced from NOAA trawls from the mid-late 1970s, Jasper Nevis is looking at community structure in Bering Sea snails. Community structure refers to figuring out not only which species are present in a particular location, but also how many individuals of each species there are, and how they interact with each other through feeding, competition, or other ecological relationships. “Lewis’s moon snail can grow shells around 6 inches across and extend their foot well past that. The Buccinid snails generally get pretty large for snails, many growing >10 cm in length,” Jasper said.

Conducting his SAFS undergraduate capstone project, Jasper’s dataset is comprised of roughly 150 different sea snail species. “These shells were scooped up from the Bering Sea and have essentially just sat in a warehouse for the last five decades, so it is somewhat of a novel view of historical populations,” he said. Jasper has been assisting with integrating the NOAA snail shell collection with the larger Malacology Collection kept by the Burke Museum. Malacology refers to the scientific study of molluscs, of which sea snails are a part of.

Shells of different shapes and colors - large, round, white, and brown - sit in white containers.
Jasper Nevis
Moon snail shells, from the family Naticidae.

One of Jasper’s tasks is to identify and label each specimen. “From this data, I can then determine fairly precise GPS coordinates of where each shell was taken from and assess how the snail community varied across the Bering Sea. The GPS data was collected separately on the ship conducting the trawls, so I take this from separate records and correlate the two datasets,” Jasper shared. The key focus of Jasper’s research into sea snail community structure is looking at changes across depth and latitude, as well as comparing this to more modern assessments of the communities.

What do you call a snail that sails the seven seas? A snailor. 

While studying or working at SAFS, many of us are well-acquainted with the UW Fish Collection, but the Burke Museum Malacology Collection is just as impressive, housing more than 150,000 specimens from 7,500 mollusc species from around the globe. “My favorite part of my capstone research so far has been working in the shell collection. It’s such an amazing resource to be able to compare specimens for identifying species,” Jasper said. “It’s also really cool to see with your own eyes the huge variety of shapes and colors that the different mollusc shells in the collection have.”

Lots of different types of shells sit in white containers, separated into the same shapes and sizes.
Jasper Nevis
Assorted Buccinidae shells in the Burke Museum Malacology Collection.

How does an undergraduate in the SAFS program get involved with sea snails? “I’m interested in invertebrate taxonomy and was pointed towards the shell collection by my capstone advisor, Luke Tornabene. From there, I spoke with my workplace advisor and Malacology Collections Manager at the Burke, Melissa Frey, and decided on this project,” Jasper shared.

Jasper will soon be graduating in Spring this year, and plans to continue working in the field. “My time with SAFS has definitely made me think more about the kind of work that I enjoy and helped me move towards this project. Hopefully someday after graduation I can be working on the NOAA groundfish and invertebrate surveys that collect similar data to my capstone!”

What are other SAFS undergrads up to?

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SAFS undergrad conducts research in Hawai’i during HPP internship

Hurricane hunting with NOAA: Hollings Scholarship internship set for 2025

Evolution and elongation in deep dwelling anglerfishes

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Many of us are familiar with anglerfishes, though we may not be aware that that’s what they are called, or that more than one type exists. Frequently depicted in popular culture with giant heads, large mouths, sharp teeth and a lightbulb appendage on top, this is indeed a real type of anglerfish that occupies the deep sea (think Finding Nemo), but it’s just one of more than 200 species of anglerfish.

Working with specimens from the Burke Museum and NOAA, Elizabeth Miller, a former National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS), was captivated by the great diversity of shapes of anglers, which was at odds with how the species is often depicted. Inspired by the world-renowned anglerfish research that has taken place at SAFS and the Burke Museum under Curator Emeritus Ted Pietsch – who wrote the book on the diversity of anglerfishes – Elizabeth set out to build a family tree of anglerfishes and delve into the evolution of new shapes, such as body elongation.

A picture showing five different types of anglerfish, with captions including their names.
Elizabeth Miller
From blobby to elongated: the shape diversity of anglerfishes.

In a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution in November 2024, Elizabeth (now a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Irvine) worked with SAFS Associate Professor and Curator of Fishes, Luke Tornabene, and a multinational team including scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, The University of Oklahoma, and Rice University, to combine genetic material that has been collected and stored from anglerfishes over many years by agencies such as NOAA and museums like the Burke. Much like humans build their family trees by sending in DNA and tracing their lineage online, anglerfish phylogeny is also based on genetic similarity, but over a much longer timescale. “Think millions of years instead of a few hundred,” Elizabeth said. 

A woman smiles into the camera while holding a footballfish specimen
Elizabeth Miller
Elizabeth Miller holds a footballfish that had washed up in Southern California.

The team then paired this family tree with measurements of body and skull shape to ask how the diversity of anglerfishes evolved over time. This is where specimen collections such as those housed in The UW Fish Collection are so important, because they preserve fish species as a snapshot in time to when they were collected from often very hard to reach places, such as the deep ocean. The measurements were taken from over 400 anglerfish specimens, with a quarter of these also CT scanned at Friday Harbor Labs (FHL). CT scans provide three-dimensional images of the skeleton and skull of preserved specimens without damaging them, an important tool for preserving very rare museum specimens. These images were used to quantify the shape of anglerfishes, which the team then used to infer how shape evolved using phylogenetic approaches.

What they learned was that the evolution of new shapes is very fast in deep-sea anglerfishes, especially in association with body elongation. “In evolutionary biology, we call a lineage like this an adaptive radiation, meaning a lineage that evolves a lot of different shapes associated with different ecological niches or ways of living,” Elizabeth said. “Adaptive radiations are well known on land and shallow water, but I had never heard of an adaptive radiation in the deep-sea. I was excited to see if anglerfish fit that mold.” Which they did. The researchers found that the deviation away from the archetypical globose shape is especially associated with rapid evolution. 

A CT scan image showing the skeleton of a fish against a black background, with a smaller photo of the fish in real life located on the bottom right.
Elizabeth Miller
A micro CT scan of a Burke Museum specimen. This is Lophodolos – or Whalehead dreamer – which appears in the elongation graphic above.

How exactly do they know this? This is where the family tree comes in handy. It showed that elongated anglers, such as the wolftrap angler, are closely related to “blobby” ones such as the footballfish. As they share a recent common ancestor, that means there was a short amount of time in between the blobby ancestor and that elongated shape they have today. “A high evolutionary rate implies a lot of change in a short amount of time,” Elizabeth said.

“This study is a great example of how new technology is allowing us to look at museum specimens in ways no one imagined when they were collected decades ago,” said Katherine Maslenikov, Ichthyology Collections Manager at UW. “Anglerfishes are rare and delicate so there has historically not been a lot of research into their anatomy. Genetics has allowed us to build powerful data sets that help us construct the family trees of organisms, but it is the museum specimens that then let us examine their anatomy to try to understand the ecology and behavior in evolutionary terms. Micro CT scanning allows for non-destructive imaging of the specimens, so we are now able to see the delicate skeletons of these rare species and be inspired to ask new questions.” 

The name anglerfish applies to all members of the order Lophiiformes, which has five groups: frogfishes, batfishes, monkfishes, sea toads, and the bathypelagic anglers. Most picture the bathypelagic group when they hear the word anglerfish (suborder Ceratioidei). There are 350 species in Lophiiformes, with roughly half in the bathypelagic ceratioid lineage, the group that this paper is focused on. 

“As to why rapid evolution over a quick time frame happens in the deep sea? It is hard to know, but we have some hypotheses,” Elizabeth added. “Anglerfish don’t really swim – they just float and wait for prey to come to them, drawn by their lures. This means the body can take on different forms and not negatively impact the fish, such as a blobby shape increasing drag in the water.” Some elongated shapes may have evolved as an increased surface area in a dark environment enhances sensation. “But all of these are just hypotheses right now – fruit for future research!” Elizabeth said.

read the paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution

Giant fish keep washing up in Oregon

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In a new video created by the Burke Museum, Fish Collections Manager Katherine Maslenikov takes us behind the scenes to answer questions about the giant bizarre Sunfish washing up on the shores of Oregon. Where are these fish coming from? What do they eat to get so large? Why are they the “pinnacle of fish evolution”?

Visit the Burke Museum YouTube channel