It's just another Mollusk Monday at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Tim Pearce at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History has a snail joke for you.

“Why do snails on vacation often stand facing the camera, instead of looking at the beautiful scenery behind them? Because they’re taking a shell-fie!”

Pearce’s “Mollusk Monday” videos have been a staple of the Carnegie Museum’s social media presence for several years, and have attracted worldwide attention.

“Tim has had a cult following for years before he became a social media star,” said Sloan MacRae, director of marketing and communications for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Pearce, head of the Section of Mollusks at the Carnegie Museum, used to give behind-the-scenes tours once or twice a week.

“I was the director of visitor services before I took this role, and people loved Tim’s onsite behind-the-scenes tours. They would ask for them all the time,” MacRae said.

Shortly before the covid-19 pandemic, MacRae asked Pearce to record some snail jokes for the museum’s social media channels. They made a slew of videos to use for “Mollusk Mondays.” At first, the videos didn’t take off.

“Fast forward to January of 2020, Erin (Southerland) had the great idea to try it with TikTok. At this point, there weren’t a lot of museums on TikTok, it was still kind of a frontier,” MacRae said.

The first of the videos to blow up was a joke about Michelle Obama that made a pun on “Michelle” and “my shell.”

@carnegiemnh #fyp #naturalhistorymuseum #pittsburgh #obama #michelleobama #snail ♬ original sound - CMNH

“That one went pretty viral for us. We didn’t plan it, but we posted it either on or right around Michelle Obama’s birthday,” said Erin Southerland, manager of communications and social media for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

“We were just refreshing and watching the views just climb … it was like, we think we’re going to hit a million views. And we did,” said MacRae.

Going into March of 2020, the museum had to shut down because of the pandemic, and social media became how they could reach out to their audience. Pearce’s snail jokes and fun facts were a big part of that.

“Tim’s content is still the most exciting thing we do on TikTok, and it’s a great on-ramp. If that’s as far as people are going to go with us, that’s great, but it also introduces people to our other researchers and our other programming,” MacRae said.

He said that a commenter on Instagram once said, “Come for the snail jokes, stay for the amazing science facts.”

Pearce has loved snails ever since childhood.

“My mom tells me that I was collecting snails when I was 3. I don’t remember that, but I believe her,” he said. He has always been a nature lover, and he narrowed his focus to snails in his undergraduate years before earning a master’s degree in snail paleontology and a Ph.D. in snail ecology.

“I think it’s partly because I like collecting things, but I don’t like killing things … if you find an empty snail shell, you can collect it without having to kill it,” Pearce said.

He is also the author of the social media snail and mollusk jokes. “I create some of them, some I modify from existing jokes. You can imagine turtle jokes are pretty easy to turn into snail jokes.” He does get some off the internet or from friends, but largely, he is the architect of the mollusk puns and punchlines.

“I love telling jokes … I have a reputation around the museum of telling jokes, so Sloan approached me and said, ‘hey Tim, can you tell some snail jokes?’” Pearce said. “But I also enjoy getting information about these amazing creatures out into the public’s consciousness.”

He said he’s trying to “make snails as popular as football.”

The content on the Carnegie Museum’s social media channels varies, depending on upcoming events, news and what the researchers have going on. “For example, our botany team loves to take their camera out into the field with them and film themselves,” Southerland said.

@carnegiemnh Snails are always home. #MolluskMonday #ScienceJokes ♬ original sound - CMNH

“We just want to showcase things that people may not see when they come to the museum so they know that there’s more going on than what you see on the floor, but also getting them interested in coming into the museum to see what’s there,” she added.

“We occasionally get teachers who post in the comments that ‘I share these with my class every week,’” Southerland said.

And the “Mollusk Mondays” posts have made Pearce a worldwide phenomenon.

He told a story of running into a family on a nature trail in Mississippi. When they asked what he was doing, he explained that he was collecting snails, and told them some jokes.

“The mom said, ‘You’re like that guy on TikTok!’ and I said, ‘I am that guy on TikTok,’” he said.

He also recounted the tale of a fellow researcher who traveled to Argentina. “The 9-year-old daughter of one of his colleagues down there said, ‘Wait, you’re from Carnegie Museum? Do you know Tim Pearce?’”

Pearce is pleased that the jokes are catching the eye of the public but also that the fun facts accompanying the jokes are getting attention.

“We really appreciate our following, whether they’re people who come to the museum regularly or people who live on the other side of the world and have never been here … we don’t have the capacity to reply to every single comment, but we appreciate them all,” Southerland said. “It’s really great to see people interested in the sciences.”