By: Zachary Tomanelli
ITHACA, N.Y. — Paula Mikkelsen and the team at the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, N.Y. are charged with an interesting task: making people appreciate clams and mussels somewhere other than a table at a summer barbecue.
The institution, which runs Ithaca’s Museum of the Earth, is one of three centers nationwide engaged in BivATol — a five-year program funded by a $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal of the project is to develop a “Bivalve Tree of Life” or rather an evolutionary tree for clams, mussels and their relatives.
Mikkelsen’s team is working on the project alongside groups from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. But Mikkelsen said the Ithaca team’s primary responsibility is to make the project’s findings engaging to the public.
“Most of my efforts so far have been working with our webmaster to develop the BivAToL Web site and working with the director of exhibits at [the institution] to design a traveling exhibit called ‘Evolution on the Half Shell’ that will open at [the institution] in October 2010,” Mikkelsen said.
Sarah Chicone, the director of exhibits at the institution, said making such a complex scientific issue understandable and exciting has been a challenge.
“It’s difficult content,” Chicone said. “It deals with a lot of scientific research and complicated terms. But we are very confident that the approach we have taken to the content and exhibit will spark interest and curiosity.”
Brian Gollands, the webmaster for the project, said new technology has helped make projects like BivATol more accessible.
“In the old days, you had scientific journals and if you belonged to a society you would get that journal,” Gollands said. “It was very much sequestered away from the interested public. But more and more there is a new publishing model, where journals are going online.”
He said this has allowed more people to read primary scientific literature. He also added that the Web has changed the way the public interacts with scientific research.
“Its not just about having the ability to layer the information on a Web site as a series of pages for people to read,” he said. “With interactive technologies, such as Flash or Java, you can have interactive models, where you can illustrate concepts that have come out of recent research.”
And research is something the BivATol project has plenty of.
The project, which is now in its third year, is progressing as the team has hoped, Mikkelsen said. Until now, most of the researchers’ time has been spent collecting various species of bivalves so they can begin investigating their evolutionary similarities. Mikkelsen said the research teams have just recently concluded the collection-of-species phase of the project, which required trips to Florida, the British Isles and Australia, and will now begin generating data in preparation for an upcoming conference in Phuket, Thailand.
Meanwhile the challenge for Gollands, Chicone and the staff at the institution remains the same: making people understand the importance of the project.
“The outreach component is very important to National Science Foundation funded projects,” Gollands said. “NSF wants the public to understand that there is a good reason for spending tax money on this research.”
And even though bivalve evolution may seem like an obscure research area, it is crucial to understanding larger issues, Mikkelsen said. Bivalves, she explained, have an important role in biology, ecology and even the economy.
“Bivalves are extremely important, economically, as human food, the source of pearls and mother-of-pearl,” she said.
Learning more about bivalves will also help control “pest organisms,” such as zebra mussels, she added.
Gollands said that because bivalves act as water filters, they are also very important for learning about our water supply.
“We can look at the chemicals that have been held in clams that are dredged out of the river, for instance, and see that mercury levels are increasing,” he said. “So if we know two [bivalve] species are closely related, and one survives in a polluted river and another one doesn’t — well that gives us a clue that we should be looking at the differences between these two species.”
He also said that with projects such as BivATol it is hard to predict what will be uncovered before the project starts — something that can make it hard to sell to the public. However, just having the opportunity to explore such areas, he said, can yield amazing results.
Even so, Gollands appreciates the work it will take to get people excited about bivalves.
“It is a very big challenge for us— trying to communicate to people that clams are a source of wonder in addition to being good with melted butter.”
Video:
Sarah Chicone, director of exhibits, discusses the construction of the Evolution on the Half-Shell exhibit.
