Welcome to Nemertes, |
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Introduction
Approximately 1000 valid, described species of the phylum Nemertea, or ribbonworms, are known worldwide, inhabiting oceans, freshwaters, and land. Current field-work suggests that at least several times this number remain to be named or discovered. Nemerteans are unsegmented worms characterized by a unique and remarkable eversible proboscis. Some are very colorful, while others are drab. They range from one millimeter to more than 30 meters long. They can be voracious predators, some are highly specialized while others are more eclectic, with diets that favor other worms, crustaceans, and mollusks. They are poorly known to non-specialists, because most nemerteans live in concealment and are difficult to collect, and because traditional taxonomy focuses significantly on internal anatomy based on histological study. However, many are common, abundant and can be key predators, while the phylum itself is important to understanding evolution of early invertebrate body plans. This site is intended as a tool, expert system or virtual curator of nemertean knowledge, to make these worms less enigmatic. The emphasis is on identification, classification and evolutionary relationships, but all aspects of nemertean biology are accommodated because all inform our understanding of nemerteans.
Current site activity
There currently is significant activity in developing the glossary (e.g., see "Cephalic glandular structure") and the taxon pages (e.g., see Tubulanus).
Site purpose and structure
Much site development remains, but we hope that by establishing a permanent home and infrastructure nemertean researchers can and will contribute information to make the site more useful for all. The site is powered by linked databases for literature, taxonomy, specimens and images, each searchable directly or accessed through other modules, such as anatomy, biology, glossary, identification keys, and mapping. The initial focus is a bibliography of more than 3,000 references indexed by more than 30,000 binomen records linked to a taxonomy database. The current basic introduction to nemertean anatomy is planned to become progressively more detailed through integration with an image database indexed hierarchically by taxonomy and keywords from the glossary. A Discussion Forum and Events calendar provide additional opportunities to promote communication and disseminate knowledge. This site is optimized for Safari 1.x (Mac OS X), Internet Explorer 6.x, Netscape 5.5 / 6.x / 7.x (Mac OS 9.x, X / Windows 95 and up). As these browsers are freely available, we are expending our very limited resources on content but we want to know of significant browser problems.
What you can do
Send suggestions, links, contributions, and corrections, especially for the literature and taxonomy databases. Some modules still are relatively skeletal... awaiting your contribution. Color images of identified live nemerteans are especially valuable in developing species pages for the identification section. Please submit complete bibliographic data for new or missing literature references. Send PDFs of these and other references you wish to make available. Provide links to personal research pages or let this site host them, including posters and Powerpoint presentations (e.g., see Sveta Maslakova, Megan Schwartz, Tristan M. Carland ). Nemertean researchers please check your data in the researcher list; send us information you wish to have included, such as postal and e-mail addresses (we protect them from web crawlers), picture and research description. The literature and taxonomy databases continue to be corrected for errors introduced in data entry and by multiple translations across databases; please notify us as you find the errors that remain.
Join the Nemertea Forum... Communicate with all of your nemertean colleagues at once or create focused discussion groups; ask questions, share information or just chat.
The task was initiated by funding from the National Science Foundation's program Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy, grant DEB 9712463 to Jon Norenburg and .
Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and contributors to this site. They are not intended to and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
This site is hosted by The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History
and edited by Jon Norenburg and Frank Crandall.
[ Identification | Introduction to Nemerteans | Anatomical Atlas ]
