A man who spent his teenage years on Guam in the 1960s has donated about 4,000 seashells to the National Science Foundation EPSCoR Biorepository at the University of Guam.
Many of the shells were collected on Guam when Warren B. Carah was here from 1960 to 1964. He said he and his friends would gather shells at Tumon Bay, Apra Harbor, Malesso’, and Tarague beach on Andersen Air Force Base.
The collection also contains shells from the Philippines, Australia, North America and Africa.
Assistant Professor Robert B. Lasley, curator of crustacea at the biorepository, said the collection is “valuable for establishing a historical baseline and for studying different species to better understand Guam’s biodiversity. It also allows researchers to compare what may have existed in certain localities in Guam back in the ‘60s to what is being found now.”
The collection includes the exact day each specimen was collected and the precise location where it was gathered.
“Not only did he do these collections, but he kept a lot of good data and took really good care of them,” he said.
The biorepository houses thousands of coral specimens, crustaceans, fishes, algae, and other organisms to serve as an archive of the biodiversity found within the Micronesian region.
Lasley said modern tools allow for the collection and global dissemination of data from these specimens. He said eventually, all of them will be photographed, and their locality data will be gathered and entered into a database where researchers anywhere in the world can access the information.