NOSPINE stands for "National Organization to Seek out and Promote
Invertebrate News Events". The obvious reason I chose the name was for the cool acronym. If you
prefer, you can think of NOSPINE as the "Metazoan Diversity Appreciation
Society", which is a better name, but makes a lousy acronym. As soon as enough people join to make
this a viable society, we can have a vote on the name.
NOSPINE, put simply, is a society devoted to the concept that non-vertebrate
metazoans do not get a fair shake on this planet. Humans, as arrogant vertebrates who think they run the
world, spend a lot of time navel-gazing and paying special attention to other vertebrate animals,
particularly mammals. This is reasonable. We are interested in things that are like us -- warm,
more or less furry, soft (but not too soft) and fairly non-slimy.
Unfortunately, "warm", "furry" and "non-slimy" do not adequately describe most animal life on
this planet. Considerably more than 90% of all metazoans (a fancy term for "multicellular
animals") on Earth are NOT vertebrates. Most of the non-vertebrates are arthropods, like
insects, crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, etc.) and chelicerates (spiders, scorpions, ticks, etc.).
Many of the rest are molluscs (snails, clams, squids, etc.) or nematodes. A whole bunch of
strange critters that you've probably never heard of, and some that you have heard of,
like starfish, sponges and jellyfish, make up the rest.
If you are like most people, the mere mention of some of these critters caused a shudder to
pass down your spine. This doesn't happen to invertebrates, lacking spines as they do. But
seriously...in our opinion, invertebrates have generally gotten a bum rap. Undoubtedly, the simple
fact that these animals seem so radically different from us plays a key role, but often the
media builds upon these attitudes and makes the problem worse. From killer bees to those
evil snails that chew up your lettuce, most of what we hear about invertebrates in the popular
press is negative. The primary goal of NOSPINE is to change that.
I also hope NOSPINE will become a repository for invertebrate
information, and a forum for discussing topics of interest to invertebrate afficionados.
What's going to be on the NOSPINE Homepage? First, I hope to
add several links to pages which generally provide a positive, or interesting, or just plain cool
spin to invertebrates. I also hope to include several invertebrate JPEG's, animations, etc. that I've
picked up by crawling the Web.
(as an aside, I would like you to note that the World Wide Web itself is linked to invertebrates --
search engine "spiders" crawl the Web, etc. FYI.)
NOSPINE should also be seen as a forum for discussion. I hope to
provide a monthly survey addressing questions related to invertebrates, biology in general, etc. that
society members (and others) can participate in. But most of all, NOSPINE
should be FUN! I hope it will become a place where people can stop by, check out nifty
invertebrate cartoons, find cool links, submit invert-related news items, and discuss these excellent
animals.
You will be able to do all of these things at this site, and maybe more, without becoming a member.
So what does being a NOSPINE member entail, how much does it
cost, and how does a person sign up?
The cost is nothing.
The only obligations of being a member of NOSPINE are ...
Send me an e-mail
to let me know what you think!
This page hosted by
What does NOSPINE
stand for?
What is NOSPINE?
Why bookmark this page?
Membership obligations (such as they are...)
That's all.
Go back to the NOSPINE Home Page!
people have visited
this site (or one of the other Fortress of Loligo sites).
Get your own Free Home Page