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.