Mr Jon Ablett

I am responsible for the curation of the terrestrial and freshwater Mollusca plus the Cephalopod collections within the Mollusc group in the Department of Life Sciences at the Natural History Museum (NHM). The Mollusca collections contain an estimated 7 million specimens (including 60,000 primary types) and the taxa within my care account for around 40% of this collection (2.8 million specimens). My responsibilities include the general care, curation, preservation, reorganisation and loaning of the dry and spirit collections under my care, and the identification, data-basing, preservation, and accession of new material. I am in charge of answering enquiries and supervising visitors (scientific, commercial and the general), and am heavily involved with associated exhibition and public engagement projects within my taxa expertise.

My current research interests include:

Vietnamese land snail diversity

Land snails of the Western Ghats, India

The neo-tropical superfamily Orthalocoidea

Producing type catalogues of material housed in the NHM

New Molluscan Names introduced by Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen

Using micro-CT scanning to reconstruct soft tissue anatomy in gastropods.

In 2004 a giant squid (Architeuthis dux, Steenstrup in Harting 1860) was caught by the Falkland Islands registered trawler 'John Cheek' off the coast of the Falkland Islands. The Captain of the ship gave it to the research station on the Falkland Islands who donated it to the Natural History Museum on the provision that it was put on public display. The squid was 8.62m in length and was the largest 'wet' specimen ever preserved at the NHM. As curator in charge of Cephalopoda it was my responsibility to design, manage and implement the preservation, storage and display of this enormous creature.