By: Chandler Olson
I’m super excited to announce that seashell identification guides for the Gulf Coast States are officially live on my website! This includes ID guides for Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas!
The creation of these guides has been an incredibly rewarding experience. Free and easy to use identification guides make our planet's incredible biodiversity more accessible. This accessibility gets more people engaged and interested in exploring this biodiversity and ultimately leads to more people caring about its protection. To date, the Seahorse and Co website has had over 7000 visits and I hope these new guides will help us reach even more people in the future!
Identification guides:
Challenges
Something that's been a real challenge in the creation of these guides is determining the ranges of many molluscan species throughout the Gulf. Gulf Coast distributions seem to be much patchier and variable than on the Eastern Seaboard. Also, collection information for this region seems more sparse than for places like Florida where ranges are much better understood. For this reason I anticipate some tweaking in which species are included for these states in the coming months. However, I am super pleased with these guides and am excited to share them with the world.
Commentaires