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Sep 28 2012 - 12:12pm
A longshoreman stands in front of a large pile of oyster shells on waterfront pier in Atlantic City in 1910. Back then, oysters were incredibly abundant. In the late 1800s, fishermen pulled in 10 million bushels of oysters each year but, by the mid-1900s, the catch had dropped to 1 or 2 million...
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May 1 2013 - 9:48am
These "elevator" rudists, an ancient bivalve, used one long heavy valve to anchor themselves in the sediment. They used their tentacles (shown here in pink) to filter food from the sea water. Discover more about the ancient ocean at our feature Ocean Over Time.
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Jul 5 2011 - 5:03pm
During the summer of 1998, scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science made a series of disturbing discoveries in the Chesapeake Bay. In June, they collected an unusual specimen: a single marine snail that looked similar to some of the bay's native inhabitants but clearly had different...
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Dec 4 2009 - 3:21pm
This illustration shows the edge of a warm inland sea during the Cretaceous Period, heyday of the dinosaurs. Constantly shifting sediment supported new groups of organisms, including rudist clams—major molluscan reef builders. Various organisms have taken a turn as the dominant tropical reef...
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Sep 29 2011 - 2:26pm
This bivalve mollusk is native to the Caspian Sea, lagoons of the Black Sea, and their inflowing rivers. It lives in fresh and brackish water and cannot tolerate full seawater. In the 18th and 19th centuries, zebra mussels spread through European canals, reaching the Baltic Sea and many European...
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Jan 6 2011 - 2:46pm
Bivalves brought up in a box corer from the deep Arctic seafloor.
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Feb 7 2011 - 8:09pm
What can students do to help the ocean? It turns out, a lot! These students from Texas are among dozens from the U.S. and Mexico who are developing action plans on ocean and climate-related issues in their local communities. They’re getting advice from their teachers and experts at aquariums and...
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Jan 12 2012 - 4:01pm
Ari Daniel Shapiro is joined for this episode of One Species at a Time by serious beachcombers along the high-tide line of Sanibel Island, Florida. These “shellers” come in search of beautiful sea shells, sometimes no bigger than a grain of rice, that are the remains of marine snails, bivalves, and...
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Feb 15 2013 - 10:56am
This pair of sea butterflies (Limacina helicina) flutter not far from the ocean's surface in the Arctic. Sea butterflies are a type of sea snail, but instead of dragging themselves around the seafloor with a muscular foot, they flap their adapted feet like butterfly wings! They are very small—...
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Sep 7 2012 - 4:00pm
Sea butterflies (also called pteropods) are sea snails aptly named: they are shelled marine snails, each with a foot like a wing, that swim in the water column like butterflies. This one, Atlanta peronii, is very small: the biggest specimen on record was less than half an inch (11 millimeters) long...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
Like it or not, giant squids are related to snails, clams, and even slugs. They are all mollusks and have soft, fleshy bodies. More can be found in the Giant Squid section.
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
These Pacific cephalopods illustrate the wide diversity among this group of mollusks. You can learn about a relative, the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), in our Giant Squid section.
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Jul 11 2011 - 2:12pm
Come one, come all! See the amazing, the astonishing, half-animal, half-plant! Journey to Tampa Bay, Florida, where scientist Skip Pierce and one of his students first made a remarkable discovery twenty years ago. Meet Elysia chlorotica, a bright green, solar-powered, algae-slurping sea...
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Dec 17 2012 - 9:26am
The jingle shell (Anomia simplex) is a common bivalve found on the Atlantic coast of North America, amongst the more commonly known clams and oysters. As with oysters, the lower shell is glued to a hard surface. Even after the mollusk is dead, the shell keeps its beautiful and shiny exterior....
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Jun 6 2010 - 12:16pm
The Smithsonian's Department of Invertebrate Zoology has a collection of over 57,000 specimens from over 5,700 sites in the Gulf of Mexico, which are now catalogued on Google Earth. Below is a tiny sample.
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
Rudist clams are mollusks that went extinct about 65 million years ago. They were the reef builders of the Cretaceous Period, the heyday of the dinosaurs. Today corals have taken over the role rudists once filled.
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Nov 15 2012 - 10:58am
The feathery strands at the back of this nudibranch’s (Chromodoris willani) body are no mere adornment: they’re its gills!
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Dec 20 2010 - 11:44am
Yolanda Villacampa is a museum specialist in the invertebrate zoology department of Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. She is standing surrounded by the invertebrate zoology collection.
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Nov 8 2011 - 4:34pm
Amanda Feuerstein with a nesting olive ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea). Feuerstein is a co-author of a study that surveyed algae, crustaceans, mollusks, and other epibionts that live on olive ridley and green sea turtles in the Pacific Ocean. You can read about the study on the Ocean Portal blog.
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May 21 2012 - 11:16am
Fitting nine of anything on two fingers is impressive. These mollusks and echinoderms are a teeny-tiny sample of the ocean's biodiversity. The Census of Marine Life estimates that there are at least one million species of plants and animals in the sea -- and most have not been...
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Nov 8 2011 - 2:24pm
“It is strange to think of a sea turtle as an ecosystem,” says Amanda Feuerstein, program coordinator and research assistant at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, “but they are…they have all of these other animals living on their skin and shells.”
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May 2 2013 - 10:48am
Editor's note: This is an excerpt from Daniel Botkin's new book The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered. He will be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, May 8th for a lecture and book signing through the Smithsonian Associates.
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Dec 4 2009 - 3:27pm
About 100 million years ago, during the heyday of the dinosaurs, reefs were built by mollusks called rudist clams. Like modern clams, rudists were bivalves, with two shells (or valves) joined at a hinge. But they sure didn’t look like modern clams!
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Sep 27 2011 - 1:09pm
Regardless of what continent you live on, the waters that surround it are home to marine invaders. The ocean is teeming with plants and animals willing and able to move beyond their native habitats. Often all they need is a ride. Enter: humans. Some invaders hitchhike on ship hulls or inside...
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