420 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
Captain Nicholson, aside from being master of the Freelance, could 
also be counted a member of the scientific staff aboard. His nautical 
know-how, his experience in skin diving, and his consuming interest 
in the lives and kinds and whereabouts of the animal life of the sea, 
stemming from the biology studies of his schooldays, all combined to 
make him an invaluable addition to our staff. 
John Finlay knew not only most of the West Indian mollusks at 
sight, but also where to find and how to collect them. To the latter 
end he brought along three very successful mollusk traps of his own de- 
vising, and personally attended to baiting and setting them out one 
day and hauling them the next, after an overnight “soak.” This 
was no mean task, as the traps are most successful in deeper waters, 30 
to 100 fathoms or more. Dredging, skin diving, and wielding his 
Weber scoop were other means he employed to add to our take of mol- 
lusks. This Weber modification of the original Needham scoop is a 
rectangular affair about a foot square and 6 inches deep, of galvanized 
mesh with strongly reinforced edges. Scarifying the sea bottom of 
sand and mud and weedy flats with one of the sharp sheet-metal cor- 
ners, he was able to dip up and sift the dislodged bottom material for 
whatever mollusks it contained. 
Dr. Shuster, an authority on horseshoe crabs (which, however, do 
not live in the area we covered this year), is also keenly interested in 
molluscan shellfish from an ecological point of view, their relationship 
to their environment particularly, as well as their rate of growth and 
manner of shell deposition. He, too, obtained an abundance of mate- 
rial and careful measurements of several species, the analysis of which 
will occupy him for months to come. 
Dr. Clarke is a microlepidopterist, an authority on little moths, 
those that are brethren, so to speak, of the tiny pests whose larvae 
destroy our unguarded woolens—clothes and blankets—or infest our 
cereals. Intimate knowledge of these insects—their kinds and 
whereabouts, their host plants or favorite foods, and their ways of 
life—is of extreme economic importance. The codling moth alone 
causes losses to our apple crops running more than $9 million a year, 
and the spruce-budworm, representing another microlepidopteran, 
has been known to destroy over $4 million worth of timber in a year. 
These are but 2 out of the 40,000 known species of Microlepidoptera. 
The great majority are not of much economic importance, but some 
10 or 15 percent of them are harmful species, injurious to plants and 
crops and other belongings of man. 
The Microlepidoptera are primarily nocturnal and so are best cap- 
tured at night by means of a light trap. The one employed by Dr. 
Clarke consists of a sizable 3-foot metal cone suspended from a tree 
or an improvised tripod. <A brilliant light such as a gasoline lantern 
is hung partly within the wider upper end of this cone; a cyanide 
