July, 1999 
SCAMIT Newsletter 
Vol. 18, No. 3 
Sampling the organisms of a moving habitat 
can be a problem. It has been one for those 
attempting to sample intertidal beach swash 
animals quantitatively. Sampling based on 
beach position will never appropriately track 
the population, which is in constant motion in 
response to the tides. Jones et al (1998) 
propose a methodology which would allow 
accurate depiction of the population density 
and distribution for animals moving with the 
tide. 
Eusocial insects have attracted a great deal of 
attention from researchers, but most fail to 
realize that there are crustacean analogs to bee, 
termite, and ant societies. Duffy (1998) 
describes eusociality in snapping shrimps, and 
describes a second eusocial species of 
Synalpheus. Some past records of unusual 
social structures may indicate eusociality in 
other species, but this remains speculative. 
Eusocial species have reproductive effort 
concentrated in a single female [the “queen”], 
have multi-generational social aggregations, 
and engage in mutual nest defense. In the case 
of the crustaceans, the ‘nest’ is a large sponge 
which forms the microcosm within which the 
eusocial aggregation exists. No local species 
are known to exhibit this social structure, but 
the possibility that one of our crustaceans 
might be found to be eusocial is intriguing. 
5 JULY MEETING 
A select group of SCAMIT members and 
guests met for the 5 July meeting adjacent to 
the Worm Lab of the Natural History Museum 
of Los Angeles County. We had a brief 
business meeting, and then adjourned to a 
small adjacent room for a presentation by our 
guest speaker Dr. Michel Hendrickx, Director 
of the Mazatlan Marine Station. 
He summarized and discussed the work 
undertaken at the station over the past two 
decades. These efforts have concentrated on 
trawling investigations in the Gulf of 
California, and south of the Gulf along the 
coast of Nayarit and Jalisco. Students from the 
lab have also pursued research on the 
megafauna along the rockier coasts of Colima 
and Oaxaca further south. Trawling 
investigations were also undertaken in the Gulf 
of Tehuantepec, but on a more limited basis. 
Prior to these investigations there was virtually 
no information to be had from scientific 
sources, although a great deal of anecdotal 
information was available in the shrimp 
fishery community. 
The huge collections from these investigations 
were maintained at the Station, but their 
contents had not been reported in the scientific 
literature. To remedy this Dr. Hendrickx and 
his students began production of a large 
number of faunal listings (i.e. Hendrickx 
1990b, 1992,1996a; Hendrickx & Estrada- 
Navarette 1989; Hendrickx, Wicksten & van 
der Heiden 1983; Paul & Hendrickx 1980; 
Salgado-Barragan & Hendrickx 1997; 
Wicksten & Hendrickx 1991 ). Later the 
opportunity arose to have faunal monographs 
published, and the collections formed the basis 
of these efforts. A series of valuable 
monographic treatments were produced 
through the UN/FAO (Hendrickx 
1995a,b,c,d,e J,g), and through CONABIO 
(Hendrickx 1996b, 1997; Hendrickx & 
Estrada-Navarette 1996). Smaller papers 
dealing with description of individual taxa 
(Hendrickx 1989,1998; Hendrickx & 
Espinosa-Perez 1998a, b; Hendrickx & 
Salgado-Barragan 1987; Wicksten & 
Hendrickx 1986), small groups of species 
(Hendrickx 1984,1987; Hendrickx & Wicksten 
1989), or range data (Hendrickx 1980,1990a; 
Hendrickx, Sanchez-Vargas & Vazquez- 
Cureno 1990; Hendrickx & van der Heiden 
1984). This is only a partial list, many more 
papers have been published, a number in the 
Mexican “grey literature” of institutional 
reports [for a complete listing see their website 
@ http://ola.icmyl.unam.mx/default.htm]. 
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