Flamingo Friday: Color Blind

Sometimes my eyes are overwhelmed by the fabulous richness of colors on flamingos, including colors I can't even really name. Molten tangerine, perhaps? Sunset gold? Phoenix with a hint of carotenoid?

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Flamingo Friday: Vintage Noir

Can't you see this as the cover of a pulp paperback? Something like The Thin Bird or Pink Harvest or The Long Wing Salute or The Big Roost?

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Clam Dunk

This post is mainly an excuse for me to show pun-based photos I took featuring my fossil clam. (Having committed myself to a “365 project”—at least one photo a day for a year—I figured taking photo-puns would be a great way to be inspired.)

[this is also a dunked clam.]

However, I feel guilty when not Talking about the Science, so I am including a Fun Bivalve Fact, even though it does not relate to clams but to scallops:

Scallops can swim by using their adductor muscles (the ones that open and close their shell) to flap their shells through the water like fins or wings. They often escape predators like starfish by doing this.

I learned this in college while doing an REU internship in Anacortes, WA. (That’s not relevant to anything; I just like remembering that internship.) I have also found a YouTube video illustrating this phenomenon: Amazing Swimming Scallops

[still a clam, not a scallop. I can't illustrate everything myself.]

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Flamingo Friday: Rock Star

(In which I play around with Photoshop because I haven't taken new flamingo photos in a while.)

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Silence of the Clams

When I was at a conference this past December, I bought a fossilized clam.

I didn’t expect to. In fact, at first I had made fun of the excess of minerals and fossils offered (very cannily) by the booth exhibitors to conference attendees, even going so far as to say, “I started out being intrigued, but then I thought, wait a second—who needs a fossil clam?”

I do. I need a fossil clam.

I won’t go into further detail (though I could—oh, I could) about how great this clam is. However, I will say that the clam came with no information, so I don’t know what period it’s from, what species it is, or where it was found.

That’s not surprising, though, is it? After all, clams are notorious for keeping their secrets—clamming up, let us say. It’s hard to pry the succulent flesh of their histories out of them.

There are some very cool things worth knowing about clams and other bivalves, though. One of the most surprising is just how long-lived they are.

You’ve probably noticed the lines and ridges that make up the shells of clams, mussels, oysters, and other bivalves. It turns out that, by examining cross-sections of shells and looking at repeated patterns of thick-and-thin lines, researchers can determine how old the animals are.

[umbo (beak-y part) of a surf clam, Spisula solidissima]

That is to say, how old the animals were—since you have to kill them to use the technique. But that’s the price you pay for knowledge!

It turns out that many of the clams we’re used to seeing or eating—like the quahogs (Mercenaria mercenaria) that make up clam chowder, or the soft-shelled clams (Mya arenaria) we eat as “steamers”—are pretty damn old: steamer clams live about 8-12 years and can live as many as 23, while quahogs often live into their 40s—and some have been found to live over 100 years. Even these, though, aren’t the real Methuselahs of mollusks—that title is reserved for the Icelandic clam (Arctica islandica): the oldest recorded clam of this species was 507 years old.

[thee clams were cut off in their youth, long before they reached their maximum age, by a predatory snail]

Compare this to the average age of most cephalopods [octopi, squid, cuttlefish], who don’t live more than three or four years, and you have yet more evidence that brains aren’t everything.

And thus concludes my first disquisition on bivalves. Will it be the last? Hard to say. I didn’t think I had a lot to say about them—but then, I used to think I didn’t need a fossil clam…

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Flamingo Friday: Loopy

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