Jouannetia quillingi -The FIND of the DAY

--< NC Shell Club Newsletter> II < Apr-Jun, 2014 >-- Jouannetia quillingi - The FIND of the DAY!! Doug Wolfe, Club Historian Those of us who attended the March 15 meeting in Ocracoke will recall that Nancy Wolfe was the runner-up in the find-of-the-day competition for her piece of driftwood from which we had retrieved a nice specimen of the Atlantic Mud Piddock, - formerly called the Fallen Angel Wing Barnea truncata (Say, 1822]. Little did we know at the time how much more that piece of driftwood would yield! After we got home, I started on the task of putting away our treasures from the weekend, and when I got to the driftwood, I noticed that there was a second piddock deeply burrowed into the wood. I asked Nancy, who had carried that piece of wood some distance on the beach, if I could dismantle the log to look for additional specimens. She ultimately acquiesced, and I began to look for piddocks. I soon discovered not only more Atlantic mud piddockslarge and small - but several specimens each of the wedge piddock, Martesia cunei/ormis (Say, 1822] and the spiny piddock, Jouannetia quillingi Turner, 1955. This latter species was rather exciting for me, because in January, 1967 I had found that same species burrowed into large pieces of Trent marl (limestone] that had been dragged up (probably unintentionally] from the live reefs offshore Beaufort at about 15 fathoms by trawlers fishing for calico scallops (Wolfe, 1968]. At that time, the species was previously known only from two specimens dredged during the 1880's by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries steamer Albatross in 17-18 fathoms about 25 miles SE of Cape Fear (in the Smithsonian], one specimen from Pawleys Island, S.c. (in the Charleston Museum], and the type specimens found by Tom McGinty at Lake Worth, Florida "in a large piece of submerged and rotted wood" (Turner, 1955]. Dr. Ruth Turner was quite excited by my find, and visited Beaufort to view my specimens (and to retrieve a large series for the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard where the holotype already resided]. She also critiqued my manuscript and assisted me with the description of the soft parts (based on partly decomposed material]. More recent records for Jouannetia quillingi include Northeast Florida (Lee 2009], the West coast of Florida (Camp et al. 1998], and Stetson Bank off Texas in the NW Gulf of Mexico (Turgeon et al. 2009]. Rosenberg (2009] fails to mention either the records for North Carolina or Texas, despite considerable prior documentation (Andrews, 1971; Porter, 1974]. At any rate, Nancy's driftwood from the beach at Ocracoke probably constitutes only the third recorded occurrence of Jouannetia quillingi in North Carolina, and the first in submerged wood! Some of the specimens retrieved from this "find of the day" are illustrated below. The original find: Barnea truncata: (Left) in situ; and (Right) extracted specimens. --< tI NC Shell Club Newsletter> < Apr-Jun, 2014 >--- Jouannetia quillingi continued (Left): Martesia cunei/ormis from driftwood: (Right) Jousnnetia quillingi in marl (Wolfe, 1968) (Left): Juvenile Jousnnetia quillingi - in situ in driftwood with burrow split open. (Center): Adult J. quillingi - inside of left valve with attached callum, and external of right valve. (Right): J. Quillingi from driftwood; three central pieces are same as above with the callum separate. Literature Cited: Andrews, J. 1971. Sea Shells of the Texas Coast. Univ. Texas Press. 298 pp. Camp, D.K., W.G.Lyons, and T.H Perkins, 1998. Checklists of selected shallow-water marine Invertebrates of Florida. Florida Dept Environmental Protection. FMRI Tech. Rpt. TR-3. 238 pp. Lee, HG. 2009. Marine Shells of Northeast Florida. Jacksonville Shell Club. 204 pp. Porter, HJ. 1974. The North Carolina Marine and Estuarine Mollusca: An Atlas of Occurrence. Univ. North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences. 351 pp. Rosenberg, G. 2009. Ma/ac%g 4.1.1: A Database of Western Atlantic Marine Mollusca. [WWW Database (version 4.1.1)] URL http://www.malacolog.org/.] Turgeon, D.D., W.G. Lyons, P. Mikkelsen, G. Rosenberg, and F. Moretzsohn, 2009. Bivalvia (Mollusca) of the Gulf of Mexico. Chapter 35 in D.L. Felder & D.K. Camp (eds.): Gulf of Mexico: Origin, Waters, and Biota. Vol 1. Biodiversity. pp. 711-744. Turner, R.D. 1955. The Family Pholadidae in the Western Atlantic and the Eastern Pacific, Part IIMartesiinae, Jouannetiinae and Xylophaginae. Johnsonia 3(34): 65-160. Wolfe, D.A. 1968. Notes on the habitat and anatomy of Jouannetia quillingi from North Carolina Coastal waters. The Veliger 11(2): 126-129 (+P1.15). .