Tom Eichhorst wrote,
"The nerites are a tough group because they are so common as to be
overlooked, many are extremely variable in color and pattern, and there is
surely a large proportion that have been named a few different times."

Some species are so common that naturalists fail to collect them at all,
thinking they can always do so later. That is why specimens of the
Passenger Pigeon are so rare although they once numbered in the billions.
Now, most researchers (professional or amateur) are careful to collect the
common shells as well as the rarities.

You can do things with common shells that you would not be able to do with
rare ones. For instance, they can be sampled destructively for chemical and
other tests, without worrying about their rarity. Their ecology can be
studied relatively easily, and can be tracked over a period of time. And
their variations can be studied intensively, yet at low cost. With rare
shells, you cannot expect to find them on every visit to a stretch of beach
or marsh, but oysters and nerites are reliable. We will never know as much
about Thatcheria mirabilis as we do about the common oyster Crassostrea
virginica, but it may be that there are more specimens of Thatcheria in
worldwide collections than of Crassostrea. Not many people would trade for
Crassostrea.

As Gary Rosenberg pointed out recently, a researcher who needed common
local oysters that were collected long ago had difficulty in finding enough
specimens for testing. Of course, storage has always been a problem for
museums, otherwise Gary could be storing buckets of oyster shells for the
future as you read this. But this is not such a problem with nerites, which
are small. Someone ought to do it.

Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama
"An Oyster in Every Collection"