Of a painter and a doctor

Yesterday was the closing day of an exhibition of paintings by Edward Caruana Dingli (1876-1950), an idealist Maltese artist well known for memorable folkloristic watercolours, as well as iconic portraits of several dignitaries of the time.

Amongst these portraits, one depicting the scientist, doctor and archaeologist Themistocles Zammit (1864-1935) was spotted. In 1905, Zammit discovered that the bacterium Brucella melitensis (Hughes, 1893) was transmitted through goat milk, earning him knighthood and enabling food handlers of the time to drastically limit the infectious pathways of the organism. Brucella melitensis causes undulant fever and was first noticed and studied in Malta, hence its specific name.

Sir Themistocles Zammit - portrait by Edward Caruana Dingli (1926)

Zammit's discovery was extremely important, considering that at the time farmers sold their fresh goats' milk on a door-to-door basis, and pasteurization on an industrial scale was still a long way off. The goat milk vendor has nowadays disappeared from Malta, but he has been immortalized in a number of paintings, amongst which is 'The Milk Vendor', also by Caruana Dingli.

'The Milk Vendor' - Edward Caruana Dingli (undated)

Goat numbers have also declined with the demand for their produce. Goats are indiscriminate eaters and may damage natural ecosystems irreversibly, as can be seen in garigue areas like Magħlaq, where the large majority of plants present are Scilla and Asphodelus, which goats avoid. Unfortunately, some herds still remain grazing at places of high ecological sensitivity, such as Munxar (Gozo), where an extremely rare form of the snail Muticaria macrostoma (Cantraine, 1835) occurs.

Goats grazing in Munxar, Gozo

References:

Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, 2010. Edward Caruana Dingli: Portraits, Views and Folkloristic Scenes. Malta: Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, 32 pp.

Wyatt, H. V., 2005. How Themistocles Zammit found Malta fever (brucellosis) to be transmitted by the milk of goats. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 98: 451-454.

New project uploaded

A small website required for a University assignment has been uploaded at the link pasted below:

Maltese Endemic Landsnails

Virtually all photographs included are appearing on the web for the first time.

The website expires this year, so I will upload the content here as soon as that occurs.

Variations on a theme, Part II

I have finally decided to change the appearance of the blog title by including some pictures of its namesake, which in actuality deserves a post all to itself.

The genus Muticaria Lindholm, 1925 from the peculiar family of landsnails knows as the Clausiliidae (door snails), is endemic to Sicily and Malta. Only one species exists on Malta, consisting of four main forms variously regarded in contemporary literature as varieties (Giusti et al., 1995) or actual subspecies (Nordsieck, 2007). Likewise, two main forms exist on Sicily, also regarded either as varieties of the same (Giusti et al., 1995) or as altogether different species (Beckmann, 1990).

The entity endemic to the Maltese Islands, namely Muticaria macrostoma (Cantraine, 1835) has, since the Pleistocene, diverged into local and very characteristic (though hybridizing) varieties, two of which are extremely limited in distribution. The typical forms are shown below.

I would like to thank Mr. He Jing for the excellent photographs and also for the permission to use them.

Muticaria macrostoma macrostoma (Cantraine, 1835) - Ħ'Attard

Muticaria macrostoma mamotica (Gulia, 1861) - Munxar

Muticaria macrostoma oscitans (Charpentier, 1852) - Dingli

Muticaria macrostoma scalaris (Pfeiffer, 1848) - Mistra

References:

Beckmann, K.-H., 1990. Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Landmolluskenfauna Siziliens mit der Beschreibung von Muticaria neuteboomi spec. nov. (Gastropoda: Pulmonata: Clausiliidae). Basteria, 54 (1/3): 75-85.
Giusti F., Manganelli G. & Schembri P.J., 1995. The non-marine molluscs of the Maltese Islands. Monografie Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, Torino, 15: 1-608.
Nordsieck, H., 2007. Worldwide door snails (Clausiliidae), recent and fossil. Hackenheim: Conchbooks, 214 pp.
Schembri, P.J. & Sultana, J. (eds.), 1989. Red Data Book for the Maltese Islands. Malta: Department of Information, pp. i-viii + 1-142 + 8 pl.