May-June/July-August, 2012 
SCAMIT Newsletter 
Vol. 31, No. 1&2 
27 AUGUST 2012, SPIONIDAE, NHMLAC, GUEST SPEAKER VASILY RADASHEVSKY 
Larry Lovell opened the meeting with the usual round of introduetions. 
There were some additions and ehanges to the latest round of upeoming meeting announeements 
and they are as follows: 
6 September 2012 - SCCWRP, taxonomie database meeting. 
10 September 2012 - NHMLAC, Gary Poore will talk about the Western Australia speeies 
inventory projeet and the Galatheids of the eoral eoast. 
18-20 September 2012 - SCCWRP, an EPA CBRAT database update meeting. 
22 Oetober 2012 - NHMLAC, sponge meeting with Dave Elvin. 
1 Deeember 2012 - there was some diseussion that the Christmas party will probably not happen 
due to a laek of possible attendees 
14 January 2013 - OCSD, Tony Phillips will be diseussing the flatworms of the SCB. 
Other announeements: 
Kelvin Barwiek reported that this year’s WSM meeting at UCSC was interesting and well 
attended. Wendy Emight was eleeted as the next President and the 2013 meeting will be held 
somewhere in San Diego. Paul V. Seott was eleeted President for 2014 and is starting to plan an 
“All-Amerieas” meeting in Mexieo for that year. 
There was further diseussion of the idea for a SCAMIT symposium at the next SCAS meeting 
with member talks on taxonomy, eeology, QA/QC, and interealibration. 
The taxonomy portion of the day started with Vasily giving his presentation, “Updates on the 
Taxonomy of Spionidae (Annelida) from the Paeifie Coast of the U.S.”. His Spionidae British 
Isles paper is in review and it eovers both morphology and biology. He diseussed that further 
work on taxonomy is hampered by a laek of funding and eompetent workers. The “powers that 
be” think that work on taxonomy is eomplete and does not need funding, but there are many 
issues in speeies level identifieation whieh still exist, and resolution is diffieult. A generie key to 
European spionids was produeed by Vasily, whieh will apply to CA/NEP fauna. It ineludes 20 
genera and provides a head to pygidium review of eharaeters and SEM images to illustrate those 
eharaeters. Definitions of eharaeter states are also provided. 
Vasily then spoke about speeifie eharaeters: 
Swimming ehaetae in larvae are shed upon settling. Most juveniles don’t have ehaetae on 
setiger one, and it takes time to develop adult ehaetal patterns, so one must be eaerful making 
identifieations. Vasily noted that speeies-speeifie eharaeters develop later than generie eharaeters. 
Branehiae have eilia on one or both margins (inner and outer). Nuehal organs inerease in length to 
a maximum that is speeies speeifie. He likes to refer to the “behavior of struetures in ontogeneties 
of speeies” as a way to deseribe larval vs adult differenees. 
Nuehal organs are a useful eharaeter. Metamerie (segmental in a eertain number of segments, 
the first one is usually different) and non-metamerie (parallel lines or U - shaped). They are 
underlined by the nuehal nerve as diseussed in Soderstrom’s elassie paper on Spionidae anatomy 
(Soderstrom 1920). 
He then diseussed the term “snouf’; he uses it to distinguish origins of pointed anterior ends of 
some spionids. Through observing larvae and doeumenting development, pointed anterior ends 
may develop from prostomial tissue or peristomial tissue. For example, in Dispio, the prostomium 
4 
Publication Date: 9 September 2015 
