No one will mistake the 1.8 million mollusk specimens at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for Easter eggs. But to Timothy Pearce, they're just as special. He became curator of the 15th largest mollusk collection in the U.S. six years ago and has kept a watchful eye over shells "as colorful as Easter eggs" to those that are as mud-colored as the dirt where they were found. Mollusks, for those who don't know, are invertebrates usually enclosed in a shell. Visitors don't get to see most of the museum's collection, aside from a small display opposite the bird exhibit. Although knowledgeable about most mollusks, Pearce's specialty is land snails, and he's traveled all over the world collecting species. Unlike his specimens, Pearce showed a little backbone by sitting down with Trib p.m.
Question: Why snails?
Answer: Because they're awesome, that's why. While many people love snails at some point in their lives and then grow out of it, I just didn't grow out of it. I remember finding live snails and painting numbers on them, then letting them go and coming back to see how far they'd gone. Most of the time, I never found them again. I was actually in college then. Since I could never find them again, I developed this technique that I call "snail on a string," where I glue a spool of thread on the back of the snail so it unwinds as the snail crawls, and you can follow the string to see where it crawls.
Q: Where is the farthest you have traveled to study snails?
A: I spent a year in Madagascar. We came back with 680 species of snails, and 600 of them were new to science. That's just amazing. You can't go to any other place on Earth and find that.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish through your research?
A: I want to put out a land snail book, but it's going to take a lot of work to do that. I have bird book envy. If you get a bird book, you can read about what color it is, where it lives, and what it eats. We know almost nothing about land snails.
Q: Why is studying mollusks important?
A: Medicines. They get a painkiller out of cone snails that is more powerful than morphine, and it doesn't have the two major side effects: You don't get addicted, and you don't build up a tolerance. They're using it in medicine right now. There are six more species in clinical trials for painkillers and another for an anti-epilepsy drug.
Q: Give us a little-known fact about mollusks.
A: The largest mollusk is the giant squid. If you think about birds, all birds have feathers so that's a good thing to unite all birds. The radula, their tooth-lined tongue, unites all mollusks.
Q: Do you eat mollusks?
A: I call myself a vegetarian, but I do sometimes eat mollusks. I'm vegetarian because I don't like the taste of meat, so the snails I ate weren't like candy to me. All the snails that I tried, they were OK. It was kind of like clam chowder.
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