Simone M. Scully

With gooey, boneless bodies covered in slime, long arms covered in suckers, and beautiful shells, mollusks are some of the strangest creatures on the planet. The mollusk group includes such diverse critters as the oyster, snail, and octopus — making it the perfect subject for the world’s smallest museum.

“Every time you’ve seen an alien in a movie, it’s probably been based on a mollusk,” says Amanda Schochet, co-founder of MICRO, the nonprofit organization that designed and built the the Smallest Mollusk Museum. “They’re slimy, they’re tentacled… they’re about as different from us as we could possibly imagine. Though if you go back to the origin story, we came from the same little blob a long time ago.”

And that’s exactly where the Smallest Museum begins its story: the evolution of mollusks over the last 650 million years.

MICRO’s Smallest Mollusk Museum explores the last 650 million years of life on earth.

“But [mollusks] are not aliens at all,” Schochet says, pointing to the Pepper’s ghost hologram of a Nautilus positioned at a perfect child height to draw the little ones in. “They’re from earth just like us — and in fact, they became their familiar form much earlier than us.” For example, she says, the Nautilus’ ancestor was once a giant apex predator in the ocean, eating our ancestor — who hadn’t even developed a jaw or eyes yet. “But the times have changed,” she continues. “Now we are what we are — and we’re hunting the Nautilus almost to extinction just because we think its shell is pretty.”

Walking around the four-sided, six-foot tall Smallest Mollusk Museum, you learn about some of the ways that mollusks have developed unique adaptations for survival. Some have radulas (a tongue that many mollusks have, made up of a conveyor belt of teeth), while others, such as cephalopods, have skins that can camouflage due to little pigment balloons that are controlled by neurons. There is also a 3D printed model of the octopus’s brain that shows how these creatures can swallow through a small hole in the middle of their brain, as well as information about how their arms — which are not controlled by their brain the way ours are — actually “think” for themselves.

“If an octopus is hungry, it just says to its arms ‘I’m hungry’ and every arm has its own hunting style,” says Schochet. “Some arms are more brave and will see if there is a crab under a rock, and some arms are more timid and won’t go there [because] the brain isn’t telling them how to hunt.”

This is also why an octopus can lose a limb to a predator (or even pull it off “just because the arm is annoying and has a bad personality,” says Schochet) and that dismembered arm can live up to an hour, still hunting for food on its own.

MICRO’s Smallest Mollusk Museum also has information about all the ways that mollusks experience the world, such as through chemoreceptors (tongues and noses) on their arms, legs, hands and feet (like the squid or octopus); or through a foot covered in tongues (like snails.) On side three, you can even see a box full of slime — the amount that would be needed for a snail to cross the Brooklyn Bridge over its 10 day journey.

The museum also discusses the different lifespans of mollusks: did you know that the octopus, despite being the smartest invertebrate we know of, only lives about three years? But others — like clams — can live incredibly long lives, as long as no predator finds them. For example, Ming the Clam lived to be 507 years old.

There is also a beach crime scene “whodunnit” section, where you can figure out whether it was an octopus, a crab, a zebra snail, or moon snail that killed the clam whose shell washed up on the beach. And on the final side, the museum highlights how humans are having an impact on mollusks and are causing their extinction.

Amanda Schochet, co-founder of MICRO, at the Smallest Mollusk Museum at Lincoln Medical Center.

“By the end, hopefully we know a little bit more about mollusks,” says Schochet. “Maybe they feel more alien, maybe they feel less alien, but the reality is… we are more like an alien horror movie than they are. We eat them alive, we’re dumping slime into their habitat and we’re destroying their earth.”

“When you look at all the animals that have gone extinct since the 1500s that we’ve documented, 41 percent have been mollusks,” she continues. “They are really, really sensitive to our behavior. They’re brilliant and unique and unbelievably cool. We have so much to learn but we’re losing them. So we encourage our visitor to start to see themselves as part of this broader system.”

“It’s not just us here in New York and mollusks out in nature. We’re all one thing.”

In fact, that is why Schochet was so excited by the idea of creating a mollusk museum in the first place. The whole idea had come after she had misheard her partner and MICRO co-founder, Charles Philipp, say he was visiting the smallest museum.

“I heard the mollusk museum and I was super excited about a mollusk museum,” she says. “I had just moved to New York and New York City has a very long history of mollusks.” As far back as 6950 B.C., oysters thrived in the waters around New York Harbor, and Pearl Street was even paved by the Dutch in the 18th century with discarded oyster shells. Throughout the 19th century, oysters were everywhere in the city — on average, people ate around one million oysters every day at that time. “We supplied the rest of the world with oysters,” Schochet said. “[But] between over-harvesting and pollution, now we don’t have that many left.”

MICRO’s Smallest Mollusk Museum in Bellevue.

Of course, Phillip wasn’t going to a mollusk museum — there wasn’t one in existence — so they decided to create the world’s first one.

They also decided to make their museum accessible in a way that other institutions — including other Natural History Museums — usually are not. Many museums are located in the upscale neighborhoods of large cities, which means they’re still too out-of-the-way for most people to visit regularly. Schochet and Philipp wanted to do the opposite — they wanted to put it in high traffic, public places.

“We decided we were going to put [the first Smallest Mollusk Museum] in a health clinic in our neighborhood because we really hate waiting times or places where people feel dehumanized. We wanted it to be a gift for a place like that,” she says. They designed their museum to be small — since space is often a premium, especially in New York City — and portable so that it could become a traveling exhibit that can be placed in a number of public locations, including libraries, airports, schools, DMVs, and hospitals, such as the Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx, where a Smallest Mollusk Museum is currently on display in this public hospital’s lobby.

“We like to prioritize places where we’re reaching people who might not otherwise have a fun experience like this,” Schochet says. That’s why they work with funders to ensure that places, like the New York public hospital system, get to put the museum on display for free since MICRO knows that there is little patient experience budget for fun experiences like this.

They also worked very hard to make the Smallest Mollusk Museum feel accessible and “for” everyone. They worked with over 40 researchers, as well as designers, journalists, artists and animators to create their first prototype of the mollusk museum. Then they spent 6 months testing it in front of audiences to make sure that it was having the impact they wanted. Once that testing period was over, they re-designed and adjusted the museum to be just right. They scrubbed it of all complicated scientific jargon and honed in on the storyline they wanted to tell. And when it was ready, they sent it out into the world.

MICRO’s Perpetual Motion Museum is now audience testing across NYC.

Today, there are four mollusk museums on display, says Schochet, and there are 3 more on the way. But they’re not stopping there. Schochet and Philipp are currently audience testing a MICRO Perpetual Motion Museum and they have even started brainstorming an idea for a third museum — though that topic will remain a secret, at least for now.

“Our goal is to be the most visited museum in the world,” says Schochet. “We want to be reaching new audiences — people who didn’t know they cared about science. We want to get into rural areas [and] into Canada.”

“Hopefully we’ll escape New York soon,” she continues. “It’s important to bring this to places that don’t have another museum nearby.”