Doing Natural History

The purpose of this post is to put our Introduction to the aquatic “macro” Invertebrates of Southern, especially Eastern, Ontario on line  and announce that we’re working on updating it for publication as a book. Our ‘macro’ invertebrates comprise fewer than a hundred species in total, and most are easily learned. These are big animals, and each species has as distinctive an ecological role as does any vertebrate, so it's a valuable asset for anyone to know them as species.... Crayfish use clawed legs and leg-like mouthparts and gills to be generalist predators, scavengers, detritivores, and even filter-feeders, of anything edible. The ciliated gills of Unionid Mussels , in their primordial abundance, stripped plankton, bacteria, and sediment from the water by repeated filtering, and oxygenated sediments by their burrowing. Their use of fish as larval hosts provides the big justification for interest in fisheries, and their life span of decades (perhaps centuries) provides stabili...

Throughout the months of June, July and August, a rotating team of ten volunteers logged over 180 hours to help us move specimens and museum cabinets & shelving, out of the retired transport trailer in which they’d spent 12 years in storage.  They sorted and packed jars of preserved fish, frogs, snakes & mysterious sea creatures, trays of mussel shells, Vertebrate skeletons, boxes of pressed plants, bags of dry drifted material, and discovered many surprising treasures like walrus skulls, a stuffed Chipmunk, and a mummified Armadillo.  On tables under a canopy set up beside the house, we carefully sorted and re-packed specimens into wooden trays and then re-filled the cabinets inside the shipping container. Then there were metal and wooden shelving units to empty and trailer to a second shipping container several kilometres away, and boxes and jars to haul there to fill the shelves again. Sturdy volunteers heaved 14 double-walled steel museum cabinets across the street...