Around 50 staff members are employed at Guido
Poppe’s malacological institute. After collection,
the shells are carefully cleaned, sorted, and
recorded on computers at 30 workstations.
Large-format books containing thousands of
illustrations of marine snails are also created in
this office.
spectrum from corals through a huge variety
of mollusks and other invertebrates to coral
fishes. As you’ve said, there are more than
60,000 photos of these creatures on your
website at www.poppe-images.com. What
is the importance of this type of documentation to science?
dred fifty-two dives with four divers equates to 7008 gas
cylinders and, on average, 65 minutes per dive—an incredible 7592 man-hours underwater. On the basis of
37 hours per week, that represents 205 working weeks,
almost four years, in the depths. If you look at it that
way, then every good photo represents a great deal of
time and hard work.
CORAL: So a large part of your work consists of this pho-
tographic documentation of marine organisms on Phil-
ippine reefs—not only gastropods, but also the whole
Poppe: To date, the majority of marine
creatures have been only inadequately documented in their natural habitat. “
Documented” means not only the photo itself
but also supplementary information about
where and when it was found, such as the
GPS coordinates, the depth, and, if possible, the time of day. Many species have
geographical variants; in some cases even the environment affects the appearance of the animal, and many
species, above all fishes, have “night coloration.” All
these aspects have been studied by science at best on a
secondary basis, and photographs can help to determine
whether a specimen belongs to a particular species or
a subspecies. This type of photographic documentation
can also provide information about reproduction, ecology, relationships with other species, and many additional aspects. I am delighted at the prospect of CORAL
making more people aware of this work.
