Natural Sciences Collections Association

The identification of marine bivalves from waters around the British Isles has relied, for the last forty years, on Norman Tebble’s “British Bivalve Seashells”. This excellent work for its time was restricted to species found from the intertidal to the shelf but excluded many species found in deeper water or on the northern and southern extremities.

In the last forty years, there have been numerous changes in the nomenclature such that Tebble’s book is frequently at odds with the current checklists of Smith & Heppell (1992) and the web based CLEMAM (Checklist of the Marine Mollusca of Europe and the Mediterranean). Deep-sea research has expanded since the 1960s, and there is now a commercial interest in the outer shelf and bathyal benthos for example due to expanding oil and gas exploration and production. The majority of taxa found in these regions are not included in Tebble’s book and this has been reflected in the poor levels of identification seen in much of the grey literature concerning environmental impact surveys. In general ecologists found that most bivalves were represented in their samples by the early growth stages and that these were often unlike the adults and difficult to identify. Such was the state of taxonomy in EIAs that the Atlantic Frontier Environmental Network began to promote taxonomic research and this web site is a direct consequence of that initiative.