Letter from your President

Dear all, I hope you have had a good summer, with plenty of shellhunting and good finds.

I enjoyed my first non-marine field meeting in June, to Crab and West Woods in western Hampshire. A large group, led by June Chatfield, and a lot of fun – including my first live Helicodonta obvoluta. [a report on this meeting will appear in Mollusc World Issue 22 – Ed.]. We had a great time as well on the marine meeting on Skye in September, organised by Celia Pain, about which more elsewhere in Mollusc World. A holiday on Euboea in central Greece in August (too hot…!) also produced lots of shells and considerable problems with identification, which I’m still struggling with. If anyone is interested in particular families, please let me know – I could use the help!

Away from the field, Conch. Soc. is making progress on various fronts. Peter Topley has taken over as editor of Mollusc World, and MW continues from strength to strength; J Conch also has a new editor, Roy Anderson, and you may already have received his first number by the time you are reading this. I am hoping that CS can publish field identification leaflets in collaboration with Fred Naggs at the Natural History Museum; our funding application to OPAL was unsuccessful, but we are talking to the Malacological Society about taking this forward as a joint project. Developing recording forms that can be downloaded from the website, sent in by e-mail and uploaded into the database without needing manual re-entering, is a current initiative for which we are grateful to William Penrice. Another priority is to keep the website going from strength to strength. and, in particular, to build up the Encyclopedia; we are enormously grateful to Steve Wilkinson and Pryce Buckle for their hard work on this.

The Conchological Society has also been contributing to wider initatives over the summer, including MarLIN’s Strandlines project, and the Linnean Society’s deliberations on the national systematic strategy. We have a splendid programme of lectures over the winter; I look forward to seeing those of you who can manage to come to them.

Very best wishes,

Bas

Figure: Bas looking for bivalves in lower shore sediments at The Braes, Skye (photo: Peter Topley)