Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean
polishnews.co.uk
polishnews.co.uk
I worked with a research project that was sensing, collecting and analyzing types of mussels in rivers that were used as an indirect measurement of water quality in the river. The assumption is that the mussels can act as a proxy for certain contaminants. In fact, they actually filter a lot of water daily so you can occasionally analyze one as to what sort of contaminants it absorbed as a proxy for whats probably in the water.
Meanwhile, water intakes typically only monitor for known and suspected contaminants. They have to rely on other indirect measurements like changes conductivity as a signal to analyze the water and these are noisy and fairly unreliable compositional change detection proxies.
Neat stuff.
I know we’re being tongue in cheek, but I do wonder if there is anyway to actually use them as online sensors without causing too much undue harm?
You can do image analysis to count the shellfish in the image, and attach an “open” or “closed” status to each. Once you have a reliable field of Boolean values, you can detect anomalies in the close count.
You could then have a grid of tanks with inlets from the clean water supply and outlets to the sewer where you monitored (more or less real time) the reaction to our clean water supply.
I’m pretty sure we’ve seen shrimp farming applications but no mollusks yet.
[1] https://www.thurstoncountywa.gov/planning/planningdocuments/...
People have been doing so for a long time which is why I use the term "squeamish" which implies some lack of rationality.
I thought oysters were "purified" by putting them in a bucket of clean water overnight. Myth?
If you want to let them spit overnight, you should put them into salt water, fresh water will kill them.
Most shellfish for consumption are farmed, and it's really important that they're grown in clean water to taste good, especially if the intent is to eat them raw.
I enjoy shrimp and scallops, but honestly I feel like given my current knowledge it's not worth it. Maybe we'll find out that all the microplastics in the ocean are totally fine, but better safe than sorry in my opinion.
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
At the same time though I’m certain any marine life is subjected to way more micro plastics than those on land. So consuming anything that functions as a filter is gonna have high concentrations of it. At least that is my logic.
This made me go from being very alarmed to the realization that if these things causes major harm, we would have undoubtedly known about it by now
People have been eating used filters for millions of years. In particular, just 60 years ago you could find small clams almost in any beach and we believe homo erectus ate those.
But just less than 80 years ago, rivers started carrying all kind of new chemical compounds, like mines' waste, from coal cleaning particles to mercury and cadmium compounds.
Then we added other chemicals like detergents, or machine oils, or silver halides from photography, plastifiers and plastic or resins synthesis residues, Hormones like "the pill", fertilizers, heavy metals like Pb, industrial acids, pharmaceutical residues and I could go on and on.
In some places like in the Mediterranean sea clams just have been dissolved by acid waters or pollution just killed most of them.
This is specially true in the river mouth of big industrial rivers.
It is not lack of rationality, quite the contrary, people with information,like those that do quality analysis of waters will never eat things like fish coming out of some of them.
BTW, the invasive Zebra mussels have done a great job clearing up the Great Lakes. At times the water is so clear on a sunny day in the summer it can look tropical blue.
1) Clearer water means that light reaches deeper. Potentially allowing more aquatic plants to grow over huge new areas. Providing new habitat, food sources and shelter for fish.
2) Zebra mussels might trap some chemicals like PCBs. And accumulate them in their shells. Once the mussel dies, they fall to the bottom, and might permanently lock up them up into the sediment.
There are almost no "native" species left in any of the lakes (excluding superior).
If you want sustainable native great lakes ecology you need to cut them off from the oceans, re-reverse the flow of the Chicago and do a one-off massive trout and other native fish stocking. None of that is ever going to happen so until then we can keep experimenting with ecology and in that case Zebra muscles is much better than massive population booms and busts of alewives or other invasive fish species (Salmon were originally introduced to help keep the alewife population down)
This includes everything from walleye, lake trout, and perch all the way down to daphnia and diatoms.
The problems for native species in the Great Lakes has been driven by the introduction of zebra mussels, quagga mussels, the round goby, and spiny water flea (bythotrephes) for native food sources.
These new species have interrupted the food chain and therefore the reproductive fitness for many native species which further decimates the natural Great Lakes ecosystem.
But this isn't necessarily a desaster, not all lakes are equal in their conditions for various species. This might just be what the lakes looked like for the longest time.
Btw., there are large fish hunting smaller ones in clear water. Most extreme example are sharks.
But the contamination happening in the pipes, near the taps, would limit the usefulness of this sort of monitoring (you'd have to do it at each customer location).
So it seems to be one of those content-farm sites, similar to the ones responsible for disseminating fake news on social media
I guarantee that if they did it around here, some knuckleheads would row out to the clam beds at night, and harvest them all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9oUGWuKRwg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmb-lH6A7A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgAONydtbnU&feature=emb_titl...
I also know of a couple projects in my area, near Poole and Christchurch harbours in the South of England, that have successfully reintroduced oyster beds in areas which were previously barren.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201230222606/https://www.polis...
EDIT: the other article linked is unavailable in the EU because of GDPR. Thankfully, archive.org has a copy of that article as well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200721190853/https://www.bayjo...
Like using rats to find landmines or dogs to find contraband without the long training times.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/71461/did-boein...
https://www.army.mil/article/50369/bluegills_monitor_treated...
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Anti-terror-fish-guard-S...
at least the new invasive ecology has clean water.
> We have three measuring devices in the company and eight clams in each. In total, we “employ” 200 individuals during the year.
This other article[1] says they get them from a lake, and are returned to the same lake after three months. They are marked so the scientists won’t pick up the same clam twice.
1: https://www.boredpanda.com/clams-measure-water-quality-polan...
If the water quality is normal, the clams open and close randomly.
If all 8 clams close, something is off with the water and prompts more investigation.
They get the clams from a nearby lake, and somewhat comfortingly, they retire them back to the lake when they've done a tour of duty. They're even marked so they don't reuse the same clams!
Nice to hear that they don't just euthanize them even if they are just clams. Guess I'm getting soft in my old age
This... has a lot to contemplate. Service dogs don’t agree but there is an essence of joy there. Can you feel a clams emotions? I guess at this point you get close to the contemplation of plant life.
There’s one thing to kill life and use it for food and then another to use it as a test for poison. There’s probably more nuances. I’m not taking a stance that any of these things are wrong. I am however trying to make sense of the consequences of these pieces of the architecture of life that we participate in.
If you look carefully, it is very similar to the neural system in any bilateral https://www.britannica.com/science/nervous-system/Diffuse-ne... . It is twisted following the deformation of the body inside the shell. Compare it with https://entomology.unl.edu/charts/nervous.shtml
In our central nervous system one of the ganglia grow tooooooo much. Moreover, the olfactory part of it grow tooooooooooooooooooooooooo much.
There's a lot of wisdom in Star Trek: TNG, and it feels more prudent than ever to contemplate these lessons as we near the point of becoming space faring species.