Epi-blog-ue: I’m Now an Ex-Ex-Patriot

This is the last entry of my blog documenting my trip to Paris in the summer of 2008. As I write these words, I am now on a flight from Paris back to Philadelphia. Since we have finally managed to get our in-flight entertainment system working, Daphne and I have been enjoying our flight. Nancy is seated across the aisle from us, so she may as well have been on another plane. The biggest downside of leaving Paris is really the travel burden.

Paris has been really good to us these past nine weeks, and I am sure that it will have a profound impact, especially on Daphne. I was thirty before I ever got to travel abroad. I hope this experience in a different country with a different language shrinks the world for her. She has had a few bad days while abroad, but overall she has been just awesome. As she sits next to me watching a cartoon and drawing a book about her alter-ego “Hypno-Girl,” I am looking forward to traveling more with her as she gets older — hopefully to Zambia, before elephants are extinct.

It has also been excellent to live on the road for so long with Nancy. I don’t want to get all mushy or anything, but she is the bee’s knees.

Besides the fringe benefits of spending such a delightful quantity of quality time with the fam, I think that my work-time has been fruitful as well. Spending two months wading through the copious holdings of European freshwater mussel types in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle is kind of a bizarre job. But (to make a very long and tedious story about the scientific significance of these shells short) they either needed to be found and brought into the light or wiped from the face of the Earth once and for all. I think that my way probably turned out to be a lot easier. With any luck, when this work is all published, it will spark a fire underneath the malacological community to take a good hard look at these mollusks again. At the very least, I will have paid my dues with this species assemblage and gained the street cred to be vocal about how much more needs to be done.

With my work largely completed last week, I slowed my pace down a bit. On Sunday, Daphne and I finally got to go up in the Panthéon Dome to see our 6th floor apartment from the outside. Forget the Eiffel Tower or Sacré Cœur: the Panthéon has the best view in Paris.


For our last evening in Paris, we went back to Le Comptoir du Panthéon, the spot at which we dined on our first night, back in May. We had a lovely meal, and then afterwards walked down to Mouffetard (“Your’re a mouffe-tard!”). Even though we had been in our Left Bank neighborhood for sixty-some days, it was still a learning experience. For instance, did you know that the burger sauce at Le Comptoir is just like the chip dip that my Grandma makes? If I had known that, we would have eaten there more often. And, I learned that a 75 cL bottle of 1664 is only 2€50, whereas the 50 cL cans I have been buying are 2€. Where was that knowledge hiding? I look forward to learning even more from la ville lumière sometime in the future. Someone needs to work up all that Drouët type material that is still in the zootheque...

From the Dungeon to the Sewers

This past week I worked like a nut. I have been driven by the anxiety that I would have to leave with my goals 95% accomplished — a lot of work done but it would be incomplete until I could find a way to come back and finish it. What a perfect waste of a summer that would be! Fortunately, that kind of fear is a powerful motivator, and I have made very good progress.

During the first half of my Paris adventure, when I was going through the Anodonta specimens, the going was slow. Not sure how things were arranged, what I would find, what kind of information I wanted to gather and how I would ultimately present it, I went through and inventoried every specimen in that part of the Locard Collection. By the time that I found all the Anodonta types, I had a pretty good handle on the nature of the collections. I had also developed a handy database interface to speed up data capture. By the time I started working on Unio the week before last, I only needed to worry about the specimens in which I was interested, and there was no confusion about what I wanted from them. I was able to do in a week what had previously taken three!

I spent Monday through Thursday last week freezing in the dungeon of the zootheque from 9:00-5:00 (the only hours of access), finding and setting aside the Unio types in the Locard Collection. I also spent my mornings from 7:30-9:00 in the MNHN library digging data as necessary. On Friday, I brought the rest of the types from the general collection in the zootheque to be with their cousins across the Jardin des Plantes in the Malacologie Department type collection. And, I photographed them all. I appreciate that all this might not sound all that interesting or entertaining, but Friday afternoon, when I was finished, I was positively euphoric. I just wondered around the department telling the few people that were there (and not on holiday) that I was done. All that remains of my work here in Paris is a bit more library work and to write up a detailed account of what I did to their collection.

Besides going to work everyday, I also managed to get out for a little tourism. Nancy and Daphne have done positively EVERYTHING, so we are running out of landmarks to visit. Last Saturday, we visited the Sewers (you read that right, the Paris Sewers). It smelled like a sewer and was so loud that Nancy and I had to take turns scream-reading the various exhibits to Daphne. We took the opportunity of that excursion to tape the first episode of The Daphne Show.

On Sunday, we took the Metro out to Père Lachaise Cemetery to hunt for Jim Morrison’s grave. That was a fun walk through a beautiful cemetery but quite a disappointment. All the graffiti, empty bottles, evidence of midnight orgies and even his famous bust have been removed. Now a fence has been erected and the spot is under constant video surveillance. There is no longer anything noteworthy about Morrison’s grave except that in it is interred one of the most over-rated hippies of the Rock and Roll Era. On the bright side, we had lunch at a delightful cafe with the best service in Paris. When we ordered our hamburger à cheval, our waiter made sure that we understood that it would come with a fried egg rather an a bun. He even drew a picture to make sure we would be satisfied with our order.

And so, we have come to our last week (5 days, really) in France. It’s time to start cleaning up and make sure we haven’t forgotten anything. I am looking forward to going home and getting a haircut.

The Beginning of the End

I think it is starting to almost become time to begin getting ready to make plans to head back to the States. The girls have just about done it all here in Paris, my work is wrapping up at the MNHN and the Parisians are beginning to leave town for their holidays. The two things that I most enjoy about Paris right now are the weather and the escape it provides for what’s waiting for us in the States. The City of Light is providing a nice refuge from the deluge of responsibilities that will hit me as soon as I get back to the USA. Now I know how Roman Polanski feels.

Nancy and Daphne are getting restless for a change of scenery. Especially Daphne. She needs some friends to play with and some opportunities to be outside without being so closely supervised. After 7 weeks, we really have crossed gone over the hump where we need to decide whether we are going to abandon our little studio apartment to return to home or stay longer and get a bigger place. Daphne and I still have to visit the Panthéon and climb up the dome so that we can get a picture of our apartment from the outside, and I think this weekend, we will be visiting the Museum of Sewers, so it is not like we are bored or anything.

My work at the museum has been going well. Too well, in fact. I had found all the Anodonta and Pseudanodonta type specimens that I was looking for in the MNHN before I left for Frankfurt, and I was planning to spend the next couple weeks moving all those specimens to the malacology department where the rest of the types are and photographing them for the MUSSEL Project Database. Who knew it would only take me two days? So now, I have embarked on a whirl-wind effort to find all the types of the genus Unio, which is slightly better organized than Anodonta was. My fear is that I will leave France with two weeks of data that are incomplete and that I will need to come back to try to pick up where I left off mid-project.

One thing that has made my work go more quickly this past week is that everyone is gone at the museum. The French get six weeks of annual vacation. This is perhaps why they are so happy to be French but also why they have never been to the moon. Apparently, those six weeks for many begin with Bastille Day, 14 July. It is kind of like the 4 July in the USA: it celebrates a revolution. In the States, we celebrate the revolution that led to our current constitution and independence from Great Britain. In France, they honor the symbolic storming of the Bastille — the notorious prison of the Bourbon king, Louis XVI — in 1789. That revolution led to the first republic, which gave why to the dictatorship of Emperor Napoleon, which ended with the return of the Bourbon monarchy, which then collapsed into another republic that then ended with another Napoleonic despot... blah, blah, blah... a few different German occupations... yadda, yadda, yadda... Charles de Gaul and the fifth republic. And, here we are today. So complicated, but a nice excuse to have a parade and for current-president Sarkozy to show off his wife. The downside of this vacation period is that the proportion of foreigners has gone up exponentially in Paris. The sidewalks are filled with gawking slack-jawed yokels moving in slow motion.

I would still rather be in Paris than Philadelphia right now. It is so hot there, and we still have so much packing to do before we leave for Alabama — one week after we get back!

Frankfurt isn't Paris, but it has Lots of Mollusks

I really changed things up this past week by leaving Paris all together. While Nancy and Daphne stayed behind to visit Versailles and have their own adventures, I left Sunday after an early dinner for Frankfurt and the Senckenberg Museum. That collection in Germany was the last one mentioned in our original MUSSELp grant that Kevin (my project partner) and I needed to “do.” We had been thwarted in 2006 when the mollusk collection was being rehoused, and in 2007, health reasons (presumably brought on by Kevin’s jinxed shoes) forced us to cancel. This was our last chance to visit the shells of Haas and von Ihering before the project expires at the end of August. It was convenient for me because I was already on the Continent, and I think we had a successful trip.

“Doing” a collection means shooting digital images and capturing text data for all of the freshwater mussels of the southern continents: South America, Africa/Madagascar and Australasia. Those data are then incorporated into the MUSSEL Project Database (after much post-processing). Kevin and I have assembled a useful resource for freshwater malacologists by bringing together more than 15,000 specimen records from collections in the USA, Europe and Australia.
Normally, we would have to spend two weeks in a collection the size of that in the Senckenberg Museum: ca. 1200 specimen lots of the species in which we are interested. Fortunately, we had some help this time. Katie had worked for me during 2006-2007 when she was between her undergraduate and masters programs. Before Kevin and I had to change our plans (jinxed shoes again), we had brought Katie a ticket to work with us in Brussels last summer. She was still interested in European exploration when this trip came up, and we were able to apply last year’s ticket toward a Frankfurt flight for her. Katie is a hard worker and has a good sense of humor (especially after a couple giant schwartz-beers), and so she fit in well with our special brand of malacological loudness. It also worked out well that Katie brought along her boyfriend, Paul, so that she wasn’t forced to spend all of her time with only two old guys for company.

It definitely also worked in our favor that the Senckenberg mollusk collection was so well organized and that Roland, our host, was so helpful and accommodating. The scientific endeavor of this short diversion to Germany was wonderful.
Shells and personnel aside, visiting the town of Frankfurt was kind of like visiting Akron or Tulsa: it was better than a sharp stick in the eye, but only just. The train system — actually, multiple train systems overlain — is the most complicated ever conceived. After landing at 10 PM, completely shagged out, it was only by pure dumb luck that I eventually stumbled onto the Hotel West — you know, the one on Gräfstraße.

I didn’t explore the town too much — beyond the Extrablatt across the street from the hotel — but apparently it doesn’t get too many tourists. All the places of interest except the Cathedral were bombed during the war I guess.

Paul had a lot of free time during the day, and based upon the experience of his wanderings, he led us to a scrumptious dinner across the River Main in the “old” part of town. That was the highlight of the trip for me. We sat outside near a painting of a local fairy-tale hero that, based upon the long blades attached to his fingers, was the basis for Wolverine, Freddy Kruger and Edward Scissorhands. He may have been a fairy-tale villain. I don’t really know the story of the Struwwelpeter. The restaurant had excellent dark beer, and I was able to get the pork hock that I have been jonesing for since the last time that Kevin and I were in Germany.

Besides meat on the bone and beer (that, compared to Paris prices, is essentially free), Frankfurt also has a little unique shopping. We saw stores that specialized in Gnomes or Brushes, for example. But that is it. Unless you are in Detroit, there is probably just as much going on where ever you are right now. Being in Paris is more appealing to me now than it ever has been, and I am looking forward to the long Bastille Day weekend.

The Sun Also Sets

Do you know what happens at night in Paris? It gets dark! Who knew? As far as I have been able to see, the sun is shining when I wake up, and we have to close the blinds against it when it is time for bed. I am a northerner by nature, but these summertime latitudinal effects are nuts. But we got to start this week right at midnight last Sunday. We had been out late whooping it up at a big oyster dinner with some friends in the 1ere on Saturday night, and we didn’t leave until all the mollusks and wine were gone. If there had been a keg, we would have just been sucking foam. That gave us the opportunity for a lovely evening stroll under the streetlights.

There was a fair set up in the Jardin de Tuileries, with a ferris wheel, so we indulged Daphne with a ride. I rode with her while Nancy stayed below to keep my cigar burning. Daphne and I had great views of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, all lit up. Naturally, one 10€ ride wasn’t enough, and she had to throw a little fit... you know how she is. On the way home from the fair, Daphne finally got to see the “freak out” lights on the Eiffel Tower. Every once in a while, instead of just the rotating spotlight at its summit, the Tower starts flashing and shimmering all over. That distracted her enough to stop crying.

Our other adventure for the week was to visit Orléans. What better way to celebrate the 4th of July — the anniversary of American independence from Britain — than to visit the city that Joan of Arc made famous by taking the first step on the road to French independence from Britain? On Thursday, we hiked down to Gare Austerlitz to catch the once-an-hour train, and we covered the 120 km to Orléans in just under an hour. The town was easily walkable, and we wandered the medieval streets, explored the cathedral, visited the house where Ms. d’Arc stayed, and soaked up the provincial culture along the Loire River. It was a fun day that we capped off with dinner at MacDöner and getting caught in the rain trying to walk across the bridge over the Loire.
The girls had more adventures on their own, which included visiting the crown of thorns at Notre Dame, but I spent the rest of my days this week with my nose to the grindstone in the Zootheque. I finally finished going through all of the specimens of Anodonta and Pseudanodonta, identifying which are types (or at least potentially type specimens) and getting them ready to bring over to the malacology department to photograph them for the MUSSEL Project Database. I found the types for about 150 nominal species, and now they are all dusted and labeled and ready to see the light of day. They will have to wait, though, until I get back from Senckenberg Museum. This Sunday I will be meeting Kevin and Katie in Frankfurt, Germany where we will be making the last of our several museum visits on the grant that we were awarded in 2003. It will be the end of an era.

It Sucks to be Sick in a Foreign County

This past week has been relatively quiet, and that has been nice. During the day, while I was working at the museum, the girls went out and about to visit a bunch of churches. Our iPhoto is just full of pictures of stained glass and statues of either martyred saviors or their mothers. I will leave it to them to tell you about their adventures. For me, the most out of the ordinary occurrence was getting a terrible head cold, a rhume as they call it here.

I guess by out of the ordinary, I mean that it has been a memorable part of this part week. Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that I almost always get a bad cold when I am traveling. In Zambia last year I was up all night honking my nose on a bandana after I had used up all my Kleenex, and then I spent the following day doped-up on Benadryl. In Australia in 2006 I was so congested I couldn’t snorkel, but I still got in the water to collect mussels. In Berlin, same deal, as well as the last time that I was in Paris. I remember coming home from London once with my sinuses stuffed and stabbing pain behind my eyes as we landed and took off. I don’t know what it is, but a “travel cold” is just par for the course for me.

One difference between trying to get cold remedies in the socialized world vs. in the USA is that there are few consumer marketed pharmaceuticals. Just about anything that could be called medicine needs to be obtained from a pharmacy, whether a prescription is needed or not. In Sydney, I went to Woolworths looking for something equivalent to Nyquil. I found lots of items packaged that way, but when I looked at the ingredients, they were just made with hippy, herbal crap. I seem to remember that the active compound in the night-time cold “medicine” was blueberry extract! Because actual medicines aren’t marketed to consumers over here, there is no competition for customers driving innovation, and there is no such thing as a “coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever so you can rest medicine.” Instead, there is one pill for each symptom. And thanks to the meth-heads back home with their hillbilly heroine, we can’t even get real Nyquil in the States anymore either.

So this week, while I was down in the freezing dungeon of the zootheque, I was producing copious amounts of snot and sneezing while I made great progress on sorting through the freshwater mussel specimens. There is barely any work space down where the specimens are, so I have had to make liberal use of the floor.

The Beginning of Summer in Paris

I can’t imagine there being such a thing as “writer’s block” in Paris. It is such a lively and interesting city, and this past week I have again found myself wishing to just sit and write. About whatever. I would like to find a shady spot with a breeze on the sidewalk in front of some cafe in view of a monument or ancient church. Then, with my notebook and stack of euros to keep the espressos coming, I could explore the limits of my creativity. I doubt that I have the gonads to be able to make such an adventure productive, and it would probably just result in a bunch of navel-gazing — like the last 114 words. Besides, that is not why I am here this time.

As with every other one before in our Paris adventure, Nancy, Daphne and I started the week touristically. Grandma Barb, Autie Kari and their Minnesota friends were still in town, and it was Fathers Day (at least, back in the States it was). Moreover, in our house, Mothers Day had been postponed to that date as well, as I had been on the road collecting mussels in May. So, last Sunday was informally designated Parents Day, and that meant doing family stuff. So, while the other Older Ladies did their stuff, Barb, Kari and the Grafferlys walked down to the Catacombs, where one will never in-person see the remains of so many dead people, stacked up neatly like so much wood. We lunched on kabobs and had dinner at the Balzar, an expensivish brasserie on rue des Écoles near our flat. I had wanted to eat there ever since I read Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik. He painted it as such a charming, neighborhood bistro. I thought the food was excellent. I had a steak and there was a big plate of frites. However, for a place that caters to tourists (probably 95% of the clientele the evening that we were there), the service was not very impressive.
Kari left on Monday, and Barb and her friends on Tuesday. Monday night, we had dinner with Barb and her friend Cathy at a little spot in that cozy maze of shops and restaurants between the bases of St. Michel and St. Jacques. The other ladies were off apparently searching for prune pie?! While we were eating, Kari was still on her flight, and when she got to Philadelphia International Airport, she found she was stranded by a cancelled connecting flight. How ironic that she finally made it to Philadelphia, but we weren’t there to show her around. Kari made it back to Minneapolis on Tuesday, only five hours before Grandma Barb arrived herself.

As nice as it was to have visitors, it was also good to get back to our routine: going to bed early, waking up early and eating at home. I made good progress on pulling together type specimens in the freshwater mussel collection at the MNHN. There really isn’t anything new or interesting to report. No milestones were reached. Just steady progress on a big project. All of the work that I have done, pulling all of the relevant literature together is really paying off now. It seems unlikely at this point that I will get through more than half of what I came here to do, at as far as regards these French mussels. I have some other goals for July, when I will be working on my own euros.

Today is the first day of summer, and it was a beautiful day. We spent the it going up the Eiffel Tower (to the 1ere étage) and exploring St-Sulpice Church. The picture to the right shows the holy water thingy at St-Sulpice, made of a giant clam and decorated with octopus tentacles. Next week, Nancy’s friend, Daniel, visits from Michigan. He has spent a lot of time in Paris and knows his French, and I am hoping that he can direct me to where I can get a cheap haircut.

Working, Playing and Visiting

Just as we seemed to be getting into a routine during our first two weeks in Paris, this past week threw us for some changes. While my work at the MNHN has continued at a good pace, Grandma Barb and Kari arrived with some other Minnesotans mid-week to explore Paris. This has taken us to a few new places, but it has also given us a chance to share some of our favorite hang-outs with our visitors. Barb and Kari’s heroic support of the weak US dollar is truly admirable, and I hope that they are getting everything they want out of their first trip to Europe.

Last Sunday, for our out-and-about time, we went to the Flower Market near the Cité metro station (right near Notre Dame). We had never been to the market before, but it was rumored that on Sundays, there are pets on show also. It was true! Lots of different plants and flowers and ornaments, and then some animals as well: birds, rodents and even freshwater mussels! It was an interesting morning, especially for Nancy and Daphne. Once I got through the plants and wishing I could bring a live baobab cutting to plant in our yard in Alabama, I parked myself by the river to read while the girls explored the vermin.

On Wednesday, Grandma Barb and her friends Clare, Cathy and Beth arrived from Minnesota via Philadelphia International Airport. Nancy, Daphne and I met them at the Jussieu station, dumped their copious luggage at the Timhotel Jardin des Plantes and walked them over to a café by the Panthéon to eat lunch. During the afternoon, we explored around Notre Dame, and then looped back to the Timhotel so that the ladies could check-in and freshen up for dinner. We dined at a touristy spot on Mouffetard. It was a fun diversion, but exhausting.

My sister Kari arrived on Thursday. Word had it on the Internets that her flight was going to leave Philadelphia three hours late. If one was a glass-half-full person familiar with that airport and USAirways, then really the flight was only two hours later than expected. Barb and her friends decided that Kari could find the Timhotel without them, so they toddled off to the Hard Rock Cafe to pick up their Paris Passes. On a hunch, I took a walk in the rain at lunchtime to eat my cheese sandwich and walk down to the Jussieu Station. Kari arrived just as a gully-washer set in, and we were stranded under an awning for a bit. Eventually, I got her checked into Mom’s room, a café, a crêpe avec jambon et fromage (from Le Buffon: mmmmmm), and some tea at the Mosque. That is where Grandma, Nancy and Daphne caught up with us, and I went back to work.


Friday was just a regular day for the three of us while the Minnesota girls tried to whoop it up on their open top bus ride. And then Saturday, we took Grandma up to Sacre Cœur to see the chuch, the sights from atop the big hill, and the proliferation of the adult entertainment industry near the Moulin Rouge. At lunch, Grandma Barb, had 50 cL of Belgian beer with her lunch, and she got nicely lit up.


But our week wasn’t spent only in showing visitors around Paris. Notably, Daphne felt the vibe of the place and got philosophical. She constructed the following: “You can’t poke a hole through me, so I am real.” Suck on that Descartes! My own research hasn’t advanced the philosophy of zoology too much further this week, but I am starting to become quite data heavy and ready to move on to the next exciting phase of my work: rearranging the specimens and identifying the types.

Kari goes back to Minnesota on Monday, and Grandma Barb departs on Tuesday, so I am sure there will be more adventures to describe in the next blog!

Food, the Louvre and Work

After two weeks in Paris, I think that we have finally settled into a bit of a groove. Nancy has found all the places that she needs to shop from: the fromagerie, le cave du vin, l’épicerie, etc. Most things can be had right in our neighborhood, although the big Franprix store is a ways down St. Michel. We have tried to minimize how much we eat out, at least for French food. We simply can’t afford it, or at least we would prefer not to fling our money away like that. When I got all my paperwork set up to start working at the Muséum, I expressed some shock that the discounted, employee price for lunch at the cafeteria was 5 €. “Êtes-vous Scottish?” It is interesting to note that, in this French socialist Utopia, people who are paid a higher salary are charged more at the cafeteria. Yuri, another of the visiting curators who is more senior than I, gets to pay a little more than 6 € for lunch.

Fortunately, there are some lower-priced dining options for when we want to get out of the apartment. Donner sandwiches, as kebabs on pita bread are called here, are a favorite choice. Last Friday, after Daphne had to visit a pediatrician about her inflamed ears, she got choose dinner. We went to the Donner sandwich spot near the Jardin des Plantes on rue Linné, and Daphne proclaimed it the best meal she had ever eaten. I had to agree. On the way back home, we stopped at Mouffetard for a crêpe. That’s living.

Speaking of food, we had dinner last Sunday night with Sim, Naomi and their 7 year old sone, Remy, at their apartment in the 1st. Naomi is the sister of one of my friends from work, and she is the manager of our flat on rue St. Jacques. It was a lovely evening of wonderful company, excellent wine and delicious stinky cheese. Daphne and Remy hit it off so well that they met up the following Wednesday at AquaBoulevard to swim and whoop it up. Daphne had a blast, although that was probably what exacerbated her ear condition.

It has been nice knowing that we have so much time in Paris — and that Barb and Kari are coming next week — so we haven’t been trying to cram seeing and doing everything into our days. We can make short adventures here and there, and then take the time to read or sit in the park or write or whatever.

The Louvre — which Daphne for some reason insists on calling the “Lerve” — is free to everyone on the first Sunday of each month, and 1 June happened to be the first Sunday of June. Daphne and Nancy had already been there a couple of times on days when I have been working (Nancy bought a pass and Daphne is free anyway). The chance for a free visit, though, was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. Apparenly, neither could any other tourist in France. When we got to the museum, the line was so long that it had to be managed by Louvre cops that herded people to two different entrances. We came in by the Lions rather than the Pyramid, which was something new for all of us. We spent the morning exploring mostly the Italian painters, trying to explain to our pagan daughter who Jesus was and why people liked to paint him so much.

Last week at work, I finally got to start handling some specimens, and not at all too soon! There is a mountain of work to be done in the short time that I am here — although I guess if I don’t finish, it just means that I need to come back. My mission is to find the type specimens of French freshwater mussels stashed in the Zootheque. The Zootheque is where the main part of the collections of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle are stored, beneath the Jardin des Plantes. It is like a big cement bunker, a dungeon with rows upon rows of mollusk shells. It is a cold, uncomfortable place to work, but I love it. Last week, I set about inventorying what was there, and this week, I will likely spend much of my time doing the same. If I can get through all the Anodonta specimens (one of the four genera that I am working with) by the end of June, I will be happy.

Next week, Barb and Kari are coming, and Nancy and Daphne are looking forward to showing them around. Now, every time Daphne whines about something she wants in a shop, we just say for her bring Grandma here and see if she will get it for you!

What Do Paris and Freshwater Mollusks Have to Do with Each Other?

As part of the chronicle of my trip to Paris, it might be fun (or at least interesting) to explain why Nancy, Daphne and I are here. This is not just a holiday for me. Even if the dollar were the dollar of 2000, I would still not be able to afford to spend most of the summer in Europe. I am here to work, and thus my costs are covered from various sources. The girls, however, are here to enjoy themselves. It is a good system, and one that actually saves research money. If Nancy weren’t here, I would be staying in a hotel for $180 per night and eating out every meal. As it stands now, I have secured an apartment for less than half that per day, and she can take care of food, laundry, etc.

My primary goal for this trip is to do my part to try and bring order to the past doings of the Nouvelle École (in English, New School). That is the name given to the French natural historians working at the end of the 19th century that somehow thought that they could improve the state of European taxonomy by making it worse. When the Nouvelle École first came to session in about 1870, European malacology was already messed up. It would have been hard to imagine how anyone could have made it worse, but they did. And we are still trying to recover from it.

The Old School: the Tower of Babel Compounded by Phenotypic Variation

Beginning with Carl Linnaeus in 1758, the result of the first 100 years of studying freshwater mollusks — including freshwater mussels, the group that I work on — was a big mess, but it was the kind of mess that was unavoidable. Different scientists working in different countries speaking different languages were describing and naming the snails and clams that they found in their local streams and ponds. That situation resulted in the same mollusk species going by various names in various places, and individual personalities came into it enough that any answers you got also depended upon who you were asking. So, the fact that the idea of a European Union had not yet occurred to anyone (except maybe Napoleon) contributed to freshwater mollusks being way over-named. A process that I like to call “super-nomination.”

A second unavoidable and completely understandable layer of confusion was the result of the fact that the term “species” didn’t mean the same thing then as it does now. In 2008, we have the luxury of almost 150 years of evolutionary research since Darwin first publish “Origin” in 1859. We know now that a species is a group of interbreeding individuals, connected by genealogy, that share diagnostic characters distinguishing them from members of other species. Of course, long discussions and whole books have been written about what species are, but I think that short definition will suffice for the purposes of this blog.

Back in the day, though, two individual freshwater mussels (for example) belonged to different species if they looked different. That seems simple and straight-forward enough. But freshwater mollusks in general have a lot of ecophenotypic variation. That is, their growth and outward appearance are greatly influenced by their physical environment. Thus, every dissimilarity in coloration, shell shape, etc. from different localities could be used to recognize and describe more species. And so, by 1860, there was already about 250 different names in the literature for the twelve or so species of freshwater mussels we currently recognize in Western Europe. Did you catch that? Science currently recognizes about a dozen species in Europe, but on average each one had gone by about twenty different names by the mid-19th century!

By now, you are probably ready to ask a very important question: “So what?” Can’t we just figure out what old names go with the current species and be done with it? Yes and no. Figuring out which mollusks names go with which modern species is, in theory, pretty simple. When any new species is described, there is (or at least there should be) a type specimen. That is the physical thing with which the name is objectively associated. Thus, we can travel around to all the mollusk collections in Philadelphia, Washington, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, Brussels, Geneva, etc. to examine the types and decide to which modern species they belong.

All the names that are assigned to the same species are called “synonyms.” For the sake of repeatable objectivity, the oldest synonym — that is, the one that was described first, the senior synonym — is the name that we use for the species. That would seem to be the end of it. However, zoology is science, and as our understanding of the evolutionary relationships among the various populations of European freshwater mussels evolves, we are going to change our minds about what the species are, and each new generation of specialists needs to come back to the types and see them with fresh eyes.

The New School: Objective but Insane

That explanation has probably also led to a, “So what?” A few hundred shells that serve as an excuse to travel hardly seems like a hardship. In fact, as far as freshwater mussels are concerned, many of the different types were illustrated in fancy lithographed series, and much of the work on those early 19th century names can be done by visiting Harvard, the Smithsonian, the Academy of Natural Sciences or some other natural history library. So then why do I “have” to spend 9 weeks in Paris?

That brings us to the Nouvelle École and the last third of the 19th century. A frenchy by the name of Jules-René Bourguignat came up with a brilliant idea. The problem with freshwater mollusks was not that their was too many names, the problem was that the names were not arrived at scientifically: All this phenotypic variation and no objective way to draw a clear dividing line between two species. Bourguignat, and his most ardent disciple, Arnould Locard, decided that they could make a bunch of measurements (to the nearest half millimeter), and if any shell differed by enough dimensions of another, than they must belong to different species. That approach probably did make the process more objective, but it also led to over 1000 more names being used to talk about the freshwater mussel species of western Europe. Most of these species descriptions do not come with an illustration of the type. Instead, there is just a list of measurements.

Although this may seem like a purely academic issue or even a “history of science” problem rather than a “science” problem, this legacy has created real complications for the present. It has led to the stagnation of our knowledge of the freshwater mollusks of western Europe, a highly endangered assemblage of animals. Almost everything we know about how the mollusk species of Europe are distributed and related to each other is based upon the work of Fritz Haas in the 1940s. So much has changed about the theory and data available to explain and study evolutionary problems since then, but freshwater malacology can’t take advantage of it.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario. A scientist goes out to sample from couple streams in France to look at the DNA of one species of freshwater mussel, Anodonta cygnea. Perhaps the initial goal was to look at gene flow between populations of a single species. But then this scientist finds that, based upon this genetic data, there are actually three species of Anodonta in these streams where malacology was only recognizing one. What an exciting discovery! Now all this scientist needs to do is figure out what these three species should be called so that people can talk about them and share information. To do so would involve looking at hundreds of freshwater mussel specimens in collections around Europe and North America, costing hundreds of hours and thousands of euros, and... oh, forget it. Just call them Anodonta sp. A, sp. B and sp. C. And then this same thing happens in Spain and Italy and every time someone else looks at Anodonta cygnea. And, we are back to where we started in the Old School, with a bunch of isolated workers using their own language to talk about the same stuff, and all because the New School left such a mess to clean up.

My Superpower

In 1900, when Charles T. Simpson was confronted with this problem, he punted. Simpson was constructing a checklist of all the freshwater mussel species of the world. But what to do with all the names introduced by the Nouvelle École? He had never seen them and didn’t know what they were for sure. But he also knew that all of the species of Europe had already been described by the Old School, and so, he just left them out. Rather than let the rats’ nest of names slow him down, he just cut his losses and moved on. According to Simpson, “Life is too short and valuable to be wasted in any attempt at deciphering such nonsense, and I have not even cumbered the pages of this work with a list of these new species.”

While necessary for what Simpson was doing, it didn’t really solve the problem. That is where I come in. I have helped develop a system whereby data on freshwater mussel types and images of the specimens themselves can be integrated and served on the Internets: the MUSSEL Project. By coming to Paris — where so many of Locard’s specimens are stored — I can go through these shells, integrate all the information and make those data available to anyone what wants to be able to use them. With the impediment of the Nouvelle École at least somewhat diminished, there will be less of an excuse for freshwater malacologists to simply ignore it.

Organizing huge masses of digitized data is my superpower, and I owe it to humanity to support truth, malacology and the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. That is why I am spending 9 weeks in Paris.

Settling In and Setting the Mood

I have been reading Hemingway for the past week, and it has inspired me. Paris is so conducive to creativity, and I have been wishing for the time and talent to sit in a cafe with my notebook like Papa to find the mot juste. Of course, I am not the first Son of Minnesota to want to seek his literary fortune in Paris, but that is not what I am here for. I have come to spend the next two months using the collections and library of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle to move the MUSSEL Project forward. Freshwater malacology — not literary fiction — is my strength, and we all have to play to our strengths.

We arrived on Sunday 25 May 2008 at CDG and made it to our apartment by 10 AM or so. The RER B line is a smooth sail from Terminal 3 to Luxembourg Station — adjacent to the Jardin, and our flat on rue St. Jacques is just a few blocks away. It is a small, studio apartment, but I think it will suit our needs for eight more weeks. It has an interesting layout, with the front door opening to the bathroom, which is split over two floors. The shower and sink is upstairs over the toilet. The rest of the flat on the same level as the shower, with the bed, kitchen table, stove and fridge. Daphne sleeps on an inflatable bed in an improvised fort composed of the kitchen table and a sheet. It gives her shelter from the sun that never sets here, and it gives Mom and Dad a little privacy.

The real strength of our flat is the view. We are on the 6th floor, and there are three, large, French windows along our north wall. We have a wonderful view toward the Seine, and off to our right is the Panthéon.

For the past week, we have mostly been settling into a domestic life in the Latin Quarter of Paris. I go each day to work. It is only a 15-minute walk to the Jardin des Plantes and the museum. So far, I have been working in the library, doing data entry. Except for a short lunch break to eat my bread and cheese in the Jardin, I have been sitting at my laptop, listing to downloaded NPR podcasts and getting information on European freshwater mussel names. It might not sound like it, but it is truly exhausting.

Nancy and Daphne have been tending to our household and getting to know the neighborhood. We don’t have much food-storage space, so they shop regularly. But their primary goal while in France is to enjoy themselves. They go the Jardin du Luxembourg and Louvre, they practice their French, draw and do sketches. Most nights we have dinner in the apartment, but we have had some lovely meals out as well. Daphne ate snails and thought they were great. Unfortunately, with the dollar as weak as it is, we generally opt for a 1 € Fanta from the grocery store rather than a 4 € soda from a cafe. Wine, cheese and bread here are fantastic and cheap.

We have made it a point to get out and about as well. We made a nice long hike to the Eiffel Tower. The lines for both the stairs and elevators were crazy long, so we decided to save going up and enjoying the view for when Barb and Kari visit in June. Today, we bought day passes for the Metro to visit the Marché aux Puces de St-Ouen to wander what is allegedly the largest “flea market” in the world (17 acres), and then we stopped over to Vert d’Absinthe so I could try some anise-flavored alcohol. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will when I finish writing this blog entry.

I love all the book stalls along the Seine around Notre Dame, and I am especially geeked up about our proximity to the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. That is our closest source for new and used English books. I am afraid that is as close to being Hemingway (not a Minnesotan, but still an interesting guy) as I will get.

The real surprise treat is how well behaved Daphne has been (knock on wood). The jetlag really kicked her back a peg, but once she got back on track she has been fun to travel with. Of course, it was uncertain for us how much appeal the City of Light would have for her, but she seems to love it. She was engrossed by the Egyptian sculptures at the Louvre, and she has finally taken to her own reading. She requests going to a cafe so that we can sit and read. Today, as a reward to for good behavior, we took her to the carousel at the Luxembourg Gardens. That is more than a mere Merry-Go-Round. The riders astride the outer circle of horses wield wooden batons that they use to impale brass rings. She got six.