clam

Have you had a chance to see this video from Discovery News showing the flashy 'disco clam'? A graduate student at UC Berkeley, Lindsey Dougherty, unraveled the mystery of this party-like effect. The clams actually have tiny silica spheres (340 nanometers in diameter) on the inside of their lips that reflect light whereas the outside of their lips is devoid of nanospheres. This is a rather unique method to put on a flashy show in the ocean as other creatures of the deep use bioluminescence whereas these clams just unfurl their lips to reflect the ambient light in the ocean around two times…

In 2006 two eager shell collectors hauled in some small but strangely shaped mollusks in deep water off Key West, Florida. Like the good animal nerds they were, they brought their findings to a shell collectors convention in Mobile, Alabama where the Director of the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum on Sanibel Island, Jose H. Leal, took up the challenge of identifying the critters. Two years later, Leal finally published his findings in the May 7th edition of Zootaxa, announcing that the heart-shaped bivalves were an entirely new genus. As explained to Florida's News-Press by Leal, "This…

Researchers from the University of Bangor recently discovered the oldest known animal on record, a 405 year-old clam, while dredging at the bottom of the North Atlantic above Iceland. Then they killed it. When I was your age, we used to have to walk to school, up hill both ways, and the ocean temperature was 6 degrees colder, and Bangor was run by Abnaki Indians, not snooty, tweed coated liberals. The animal --an ocean quahog nicknamed Ming because that's which dynasty was ruling China when the old feller was born--was precisely 31 years older than the previous record holder, another ocean…