April, 2000 
SCAMIT Newsletter 
Vol. 18, No. 12 
to the above listed price] have been 
determined. They are expected to run around 
$7.00, depending on the exact weight of the 
volume when bound. 
10 APRIL MEETING MINUTES 
The meeting was held at the Worm Lab at the 
Los Angeles County Museum of Natural 
History. President Ron Velarde started the 
business portion of the meeting by announcing 
several upcoming meetings. On May 8, there 
will be a meeting at SCCWRP to update 
Edition 4 of the SCAMIT species list. On 
May 30, there will be a polychaete meeting at 
the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural 
History. The guest speaker will be spioniform 
specialist Vasily Radashevsky from the 
Institute of Marine Biology, Vladivostok, 
Russia. His talk’s tentative title is “Spionida 
(Annelida: Polychaeta): from observations of 
specimens to phylogenetic analysis (and a little 
bit more!)”. Our northern members will be 
pleased to know that Vasily will also speak at a 
NAMIT meeting on May 24 th , to be held at the 
University of Washington’s Tacoma campus. 
Email Val Macdonald, NAMIT secretary, for 
details: < val@biologica.bc.ca>. For both 
meetings people are encouraged to bring their 
problem spionida specimens - Spionidae, 
Poecilochaetidae, Trochochaetidae, 
Uncispionidae and Longosomatidae - for 
examination. 
The annual Southern California Academy of 
Sciences meeting will be held at the University 
of Southern California on May 19-20. On June 
12, there will be a non-polychaete SCAMIT 
meeting; the location has not yet been 
determined. 
Literature circulated at the meeting included 
one of the classic ecological references for 
southern California monitoring, Gary Smith’s 
1974 Ph.D. thesis, “Some effects of sewage 
discharge to the marine environment” (UCSD, 
334 pp.). The specimens from this study are 
housed at LACM. When Leslie Harris tried to 
find a copy of the thesis to accompany the 
collection, she was greatly surprised to find 
none was available thru any of the local 
monitoring labs. Another classic brought out 
by Leslie, this one concerning polychaetes, 
was “A Catalogue of the British Non- 
parasitical worms in the collection of the 
British Museum by George Johnston”, M.D. 
Edin., London 1865. 
Don talked about the May meeting at 
SCCWRP. He encouraged everyone to attend 
and bring changes and comments for Edition 4. 
People who have new taxa which they would 
like to be included in Edition 4 must first 
distribute voucher sheets. It was suggested that 
a topic for discussion at the meeting should be 
whether to include species that were newly 
encountered during the Bight’98 project. 
We were then treated to a slide show from 
Leslie Harris. In March she visited our 
colleague Dr. Viviane Solis-Weiss at her lab in 
the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar y Limnologia, 
U.N.A.M., Mexico. The primary reason for 
her trip was to pick up samples that Viviane 
very generously donated to LACM’s worm 
collection, and to promote future collaboration 
between the polychaete sections at LACM and 
ICML. Secondary was a quick trip to 
Acapulco with Viviane and some of her 
students to samples worms at sites visited by 
Dr. Enrique Rioja. All of Rioja’s type 
specimens have been lost, and neotypes need to 
be established to stabilize the taxonomy of his 
species. The beaches where Rioja sampled 50- 
60 years ago have undergone considerable 
development in the intervening years. Where 
once there were small villages and minimal 
tourist accommodations are now continuous 
rows of high-rise hotels, restaurants, shops, and 
very crowded beaches. The group was forced 
to travel several hours north of Acapulco to 
find beaches comparable to what Rioja would 
have seen. They brought back samples which 
were split for sorting between LACM and 
ICML. With luck, new specimens of Rioja’s 
species will be found in the samples which will 
serve as neotypes. 
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