The clams that sail the seas on rafts of kelp

On October 19, 2018October 19, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clams3 Comments

The streamlined shells of *Gaimardia trapesina*. Source: New Zealand Mollusca

Bivalves are not known as champion migrators. While scallops can swim and many types of bivalves can burrow, most bivalves are primarily sessile (non-moving on the ocean bottom). So for many bivalves, the primary method they use to colonize new territories is to release planktotrophic (“plankton-eating”) larvae, which can be carried to new places by currents and feed on other plankton surrounding them. Many bivalves have broad distributions because of their ability to hitchhike on ocean currents when they are microscopic. They don’t even pack a lunch, instead eating whatever other plankton is around them. But once they settle to grow, they are typically fixed in place.

Not all bivalves have a planktotrophic larval stage, though. Larvae of lecithotrophic bivalve species (“yolk-eaters”) have yolk-filled eggs which provide them with a package of nutrition to help them along to adulthood. Others are brooders, meaning that rather than releasing eggs and sperm into the water column to fertilize externally, they instead internally develop the embryos of their young to release to the local area when they are more fully developed. This strategy has some benefits. Brooders invest more energy into the success of their offspring and therefore may exhibit a higher survival rate than other bivalves that release their young as plankton to be carried by the sea-winds. This is analogous to the benefits that K-strategist vertebrate animals like elephants have compared to r-strategist mice: each baby is more work, and more risky, but is more likely to survive to carry your genes to the next generation.

Brooding is particularly useful at high latitudes, where the supply of phytoplankton that is the staple food of most planktrophic bivalve larvae is seasonal and may limit their ability to survive in large numbers. But most of these brooding bivalves stay comparatively local compared to their planktonic brethren. Their gene flow is lower on average as a result, with greater diversity in genetic makeup between populations of different regions. And generally, their species ranges are more constricted as a result of their limited ability to distribute themselves.

gtrap2 — A bunch of *G. trapesina* attached to kelp. Notice the hitchhiking clams have in turn had hitchhiking barnacles attach to them. Freeloaders on freeloaders! Source: Eleonora Puccinelli

But some brooding bivalves have developed a tool to have it all: they nurture their young and colonize new territories by sailing the seas using kelp rafts. The clam Gaimardia trapesina has evolved to attach itself to giant kelp using long, stringy, elastic byssal threads and a sticky foot which helps it hold on for dear life. The kelp floats with the help of gas-filled pneumatocysts, and grows in the surge zone where it often is ripped apart or dislodged by the waves to be carried away by the tides and currents. This means that if the clam can persist through that wave-tossed interval to make it into the current, it can be carried far away. Though they are brooders, they are distributed across a broad circumpolar swathe of the Southern Ocean through the help of their their rafting ability. They nurture their embryos on specialized filaments in their bodies and release them to coat the surfaces of their small floating kelp worlds. The Southern Ocean is continuously swirling around the pole due to the dominance of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which serves as a constant conveyor belt transporting G. trapesina across the southern seas. So while G. trapesina live packed in on small rafts, they can travel to faraway coastlines using this skill.

pic_w-msc-197185 — The broad circumpolar distribution of *G. trapesina*. Source: Sealifebase

The biology of G. trapesina was described in greater detail in a recent paper from a team of South African researchers led by Dr. Eleonora Puccinelli, who found that the clams have evolved to not bite the hands (kelp blades?) that feed them. Tests of the isotopic composition of the clams’ tissue shows that most of their diet is made up of detritus (loose suspended particles of organic matter) rather than kelp. If the clams ate the kelp, they would be destroying their rafts, but they are gifted with a continuous supply of new food floating by as they sail from coast to coast across the Antarctic and South American shores. But they can’t be picky when they’re floating in the open sea, and instead eat whatever decaying matter they encounter.

shell-gaimardia-trapesina — Falkland Islands stamp featuring *G. trapesina*. Source.

The clams are small, around 1 cm in size, to reduce drag and allow for greater populations to share the same limited space of kelp. Their long, thin byssal threads regrow quickly if they are torn, which is a useful skill when their home is constantly being torn by waves and scavengers. Unlike other bivalves, their shells are thin and fragile and they do not really “clam up” their shells when handled. They prioritize most of their energy into reproduction and staying stuck to their rafts, and surrender to the predators that may eat them. There are many species that rely on G. trapesina as a food source at sea, particularly traveling seabirds, which descend to pick them off of kelp floating far from land. In that way, these sailing clams serve as an important piece of the food chain in the southernmost seas of our planet, providing an energy source for birds during their migrations to and from the shores of the Southern continents.

Weird Clam Profile: Pinna nobilis

On July 22, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clamsLeave a comment

8175041434_a8b6c7e573_o — A fan mussel among the seagrass it calls home (Arnaud Abadie on Flickr)

The fan mussels (Pinna nobilis) are a species of enormous mussel which live in seagrass beds of the Mediterranean Sea. They can grow to nearly 4 feet long (though most are 1-2 feet in size at maturity), and live with most of their bodies protruding straight up out of the sediment, anchored down into the sand with long rootlike byssal threads which grow out of their rear hinge.

muerte-masiva-nacra-pinna-nobilis1 — They are really enormous (Marc Arenas Camps on WordPress)

These mussels grow up to 20 cm per year, almost entirely in the vertical direction. As they gain in mass, their bodies start to sink in the sand beneath them, so it is believed this extremely fast growth rate evolved in order to stay above the sediment. It also helps them to remain elevated above the seagrass around them, where they can access passing phytoplankton and organic particles in the current.

SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA — A sea silk glove (Wikipedia)

Because they are exposed to the current like a giant fan, they need a very strong anchor. So they create huge quantities of byssal threads which root them down in the sand. These byssal threads are known as as “sea silk” and communities around the Mediterranean have used the silk to sew clothing for thousands of years. The material is extremely fine but strong, and has historically been of immense value as a result. Sea silk or sea wool is mentioned in writings of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

Unfortunately, the fan mussels are considered critically endangered due to overharvesting, pollution, climate change and destruction of their native seagrass habitats. However, they are now protected and active conservation efforts are underway. When the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground off of Italy in 2012, a community of fan mussels were rescued from a seagrass bed next to the wreck and moved to another nearby site. I hope someday to study the fan mussels because I find them to be a truly charismatic bivalve with many interesting mysteries still waiting to be uncovered about their unique lifestyle.

IMGP2909 — Huge pen shell I saw at the Hebrew University Museum in Jerusalem. My lens cap is only 6 cm to give you a sense of scale! The shells are fragile and easily break.

Killer Clams

On July 22, 2018July 22, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clams1 Comment

Some shells of the carnivorous genus *Cardiomya*. Notice the protuberance off one side, making space for the overdeveloped siphon they use to capture prey (Machado et al. 2016)

You might think of clams as rather pacifistic creatures. Most of them are; the majority of bivalves are filter-feeding organisms that suck in seawater and eat the yummy stuff being carried by the currents. This mostly means phytoplankton, tiny single-celled photosynthetic plankton which make up most of the biomass in the world’s oceans. Most bivalves could be considered exclusively herbivorous, but as I’ve learned happens throughout evolutionary biology, there are exceptions to every rule. We already talked about parasitic bivalves that have evolved to hitch a ride on other hapless marine animals. But there is an even more sinister lineage of bivalves waiting in the sediment: yes, I’m talking about killer clams.

View of the oversized siphon (Machado et al. 2016)

Carnivory in bivalves has evolved multiple times, but the majority of known carnivorous bivalves fall within an order called the Anomalodesmata. Within that order, two families of clams called the Poromyidae and Cuspariidae have a surprising number of species which are known to eat multicellular prey.

Screenshot_2018-07-22 Clams.png — Evil clams are also the star of my favorite Spongebob episode

Now, you can rest easy because there are no clams that eat people. You’re safe from the Class Bivalvia, as far as we know. But if you were a small crustacean like a copepod, isopod or ostracod, you would be quite concerned about the possibility of being eaten by a poromyid clam in certain regions of the world. These clams lie in wait in the sediment like a sarlacc, with sensory tentacles feeling for passing prey and a large, overdeveloped siphon ready to suck up or engulf their helpless targets.

Until we catch the feeding behavior of poromyids on video, these whimsical artist’s depictions will have to do (Morton 1981).

Because they spend their lives under the sediment, these clams aren’t very well studied, and the first video of them alive was only taken in recent years. In addition, many of these killer clams live in deeper water, where their murderous lifestyle provides an advantage because food supplies can be much more sparse than in the sun-drenched shallow coastal zone. Much like the venus flytrap and carnivorous plants have arisen in response to the low nutrient supply of boggy swamp environments, the ability to eat alternative prey is valuable to the killer clams in all sorts of unconventional environments.

The siphon which these clams use to suck up their prey is a repurposed organ. In most other bivalves, the siphon is usually a snorkel-like organ which enables the clam to safely remain buried deep in the sediment and still breathe in oxgyen and food-rich water from open water above. But for the poromyids, the siphon is instead a weapon which can be used like a vaccum cleaner hose, or even be enlarged to engulf hapless prey. The poromyids have also evolved to have a much more complex, muscular stomach than any other bivalves. It takes a lot more energy to digest multicellular food, while most other bivalves simply just feed from the single-celled food they catch on their gills, expelling the other un-needed junk as “pseudofeces.”

*Dilemma*, another strange carnivorous bivalve which eats marine isopods (pill bugs), found from deep waters off the the Florida Keys, Vanuatu and New Zealand (Leal 2008)

Hopefully soon we will have video of this predatory activity in action. But until then, you can imagine that somewhere on earth, tiny copepods foraging on the surface of the sediment pass by a strange field of squishy tentacles. Suddenly, out of nowhere a hellish giant vacuum hose appears in view and sucks them in like Jonah and the whale. Then it’s just darkness and stomach acid. What a way to go!

*Lyonsiella* going after a doomed copepod (Morton 1984).

Weird Clam Profile: Hammer Oysters

On July 1, 2018July 2, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clams1 Comment

naturalis_biodiversity_center_-_zma-moll-1264_-_malleus_malleus_28linnaeus2c_175829_-_malleidae_-_mollusc_shell — *Malleus malleus* from Indonesia. Source: Wikipedia

Oyster. Reading that word, you probably formed an image in your mind of a rough-shelled creature with a shiny mother-of-pearl (nacreous) inside that someone pulled out of some silt in an estuary. And yes, that’s what most oysters look like. Some oysters are of additional economic value through their creation of pearls. These pearl oysters have long, straight hinge lines and live in the tropics in and around coral reefs.

4880314958_03e3a2b85c_o — A pearl oyster. See the straight hinge? Source: Pearl Paradise on Flickr

The hammer oysters are another sort of oyster, not of the Ostreidae family that includes most of the bivalves we think of as oysters, but still closely related and in its own family, the Malleidae. Malleus is the latin word for hammer, and the most distinctive genus of hammer oysters indeed look just like a hammer sitting on the seafloor.

73494_orig — In a typical life position in a seagrass bed. Notice all the algae, anemones and other encrusting creatures freeloading off the hammer oyster’s hard work. Source: Ria Tan on EOL

What the…that thing’s alive? How does that even work? This is an oyster? That’s how I imagine the first scientist to discover the hammer oyster reacting. Because they are weird and rather incomprehensible-looking. But when you know the way they live, it makes more sense.

maleus_albus — There is a small area of nacre (mother of pearl) in the area near the rear of the interior. Source: Archerd Shell Collection

The hammerhead part of the oyster is just a super elongated hinge. The creature has a long, straight hinge like other oysters, but it has evolved to instead have a relatively narrow set of valves attached to that ridiculously overbuilt hinge. Like other oysters, they secrete byssal threads from their backside to attach themselves to the bottom. The narrow valves commonly poke up out of sandy bottoms in tropical waters nearby coral reefs. They do particularly well in seagrass beds, and often live in large colonies similar to other oysters.

hammer-oyster-with-natural-attachment-seashell — Shell collectors seek out hammer oyster shells which have other bivalves attached. Here is a thorny oyster living on top of *Malleus*. Two for one! Source

The absurd hinge helps these creatures to stay anchored into the sediment, but also serves as “wings” that help it avoid sinking into the sediment over time. One thing us humans don’t realize sitting on sand is that it actually acts like a liquid. Over time, if we sat on wet sand, we would likely begin to sink in unless we spread out our arms and legs to increase our surface area. In the ocean, all sand is quicksand. Different organisms have different strategies to avoid being engulfed by the sediment they live on, and the hammer oyster has had good success with its strategy. It doesn’t care that you think it looks weird. It just sits there, filtering water for passing food particles and plankton. It’s very good at it, has been perfecting the strategy for over 250 million years, and doesn’t need your smartass remarks, thank you very much.

original — Another shot of a happy hammer oyster doing what it does best, in a seagrass bed near Singapore. Source: Wild Singapore on iNaturalist

The boring giant clam is anything but.

On June 21, 2018June 24, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, Chemistry, clams3 Comments

crocea2 — *Tridacna crocea*, bored into a coral head on a reef in Palau

There are many types of giant clam. Not all of them are giant; the boring giant clam, Tridacna crocea, only grows to 10 cm long or so. The boring giant clam is not so named because it’s dull; its main skill is its ability to bore into the coral of its coral reef home and live with its entire shell and body embedded in the living coral. They sit there with their colorful mantle edge exposed from a thin opening in the coral, harvesting energy from sunlight like the other giant clams. When disturbed by the shadow of a human or other such predator, they retract their mantle and close their shell, encased by an additional wall of coral skeleton. It’s a clever defensive strategy, and they are some of the most numerous giant clams in many reefs in the Eastern and Southern Equatorial Pacific.

But it’s always been a mystery of how they bore away at the coral so efficiently, and how they continue to enlarge their home as they grow their shell. There are other bivalves that are efficient borers, including the pholad clams (“piddocks”) which use sharp teeth on their hinge to carve their way into solid rock, and the shipworms, which have abandoned their protective shell and instead use their two valves as teeth to burrow into wood. Both of these methods of boring are pretty straightforward.

bivalve_pholas_dactylus_common_piddock_24-08-10_shells_1 — Piddocks in next to holes that they made in solid rock. Source: Aphotomarine

medium — Shipworm embedded in wood. Source: Michigan Science Art via Animal Diversity Web

But the boring giant clam has no such adaptation. It does not have large teeth on its hinge to carve at the coral. Such abrasion of the coral would also not explain how they widen the opening of their cubby-holes to allow their shell to grow wider. This mystery has long confounded giant clam researchers. I myself have wondered about it, and was surprised to find there was no good answer in the literature about it. But now, a team of scientists may have cracked the problem once and for all.

At the back of T. crocea‘s shell at the hinge, there is a large “byssal opening” with a fleshy foot which they can extend out of the opening to attach themselves to surfaces. Giant clams that don’t embed in coral (“epifaunal,” resting on the surface of the coral rather than “infaunal,” buried in the coral) lack this opening. The researchers suspected that the foot was the drilling instrument the clam used to create its home.

dscn0083 — Byssal opening of *T. crocea* with the foot retracted. Source: NickB on Southwest Florida Marine Aquarium Society

How could a soft fleshy foot drill into the solid calcium carbonate (CaCO3) skeleton of corals? I can confirm from experience that my own foot makes for a very ineffective drilling instrument in such a setting. But T. crocea has a secret weapon: the power of acid-base chemistry. CaCO3 can be dissolved by acids. You may well have taken advantage of this chemistry to settle your acid stomach by taking a Tums, which is made of CaCO3 and reacts with the excessive hydrochloric acid in your stomach, leaving your tummy with a more neutral pH. pH is a scale used to measure acidity, with low numbers indicating very acidic solutions like lemon juice, and high pH indicating a basic solution like bleach.

Scientists are well aware of the hazards corals face from decreasing pH (increasing acidity) in the oceans. All the CO2 we are emitting, in addition to being a greenhouse gas, dissolves in the ocean as carbonic acid and gets to work reacting and dissolving away the skeletons of corals and any other “calcifying” organisms that make shells. It makes it harder for corals to form their skeletons and is already worsening die-offs of corals in some areas. The researchers suspected that the clams use this phenomena to their advantage at a small scale, lowering the pH with their foot somehow to dissolve away the coral to make their borehole.

Using a wedge to keep open a *Tridacna* shell in my Red Sea work. We took a small blood sample with permission of local authorities. This caused no lasting effects to the clams.

But they needed to prove it, and that was a challenge. Giant clams can be unwilling research participants. I myself have observed this in trying to take samples of their body fluid for my own research. When they sense the presence of a predator, they immediately clam up in their protective shell. I used a small wedge to keep their shells open to allow me to take a sample of their body fluid, but the researchers working on T. crocea needed to convince the clam to place its foot on a piece of pH-sensitive foil, keep it there and do whatever acid-secreting magic allows it to burrow into coral. They would then be able to measure whether it indeed is making the water around its foot more acidic, and by how much.

In what I can only assume was an extended process of trial and error and negotiation with a somewhat unwilling research subject, the researchers found exactly the right angle needed to convince the clam that it was safe enough to try making a coral home. But it was not in coral, instead sitting in an aquarium, on top of a special type of foil that changes color when exposed to changing pH, like a piece of high-tech litmus paper. The researchers discovered that their suspicions were correct: the clams do make the area around their feet significantly more acidic than the surrounding seawater, as much as two to four pH units lower. Where seawater is around a pH of around 8, the clams were regularly reducing pH to as low as 6 (about the level of milk) and sometimes as low as 4.6 (about the pH of acid rain). Small differences in pH can make a big difference in the power of an acid because each pH unit corresponds to 10x more protons (hydrogen ions, H+) in the water. The protons are the agent that dissolves CaCO3. Each proton can take out one molecule of coral skeleton. The clams are dissolving away coral skeleton to make holes with only their feet!

Footage of the pH- sensitive foil, with darker areas corresponding to lower pH. The areas of low pH (high acidity) correspond exactly to the “footprint” of the clam!

But what in T. crocea‘s foot allows them to make acid? I know that my foot does not do this, though that would be a very entertaining and obscure superpower. The researchers found the enzymes called vacuolar-type H+-ATPase (VHA) present in great quantities in the outermost cells of the clam’s feet. These enzymes are found throughout the tree of life and are proton pumps that can quickly reduce pH through active effort. Other prior researchers like the influential Sir Maurice Yonge, a legendary British marine biologist who worked extensively with giant clams, had suspected that the clams had used acid but had never been able to detect a change in pH in the seawater around the clams’ feet through more conventional methods. It was only because of new technologies like the pH paper that this research team was able to finally solve this issue. And now, I suspect other groups will want to re-investigate the importance of VHA in their study organisms. Many branches of the tree of life may be utilizing acid-base chemistry to their advantage in ways we never had previously imagined.

Weird Clam Profile: The Heart Cockles

On June 13, 2018June 13, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clams2 Comments

corculum_cardissa_002 — Corculum cardissa (from Wikipedia)

The heart cockle (Corculum cardissa) is so named because of its heart shaped shell. It is native to warm equatorial waters of the Indo-Pacific. While many bivalves sit with the their ventral valve facing down, the heart cockle sits on its side, with one side of both valves facing downward. The valves have adapted to resemble wings and are flat on the bottom, providing surface area that allows the bivalve to “raft” on the surface of soft sandy sediment and not sink. They may also sit embedded in little heart-shaped holes on the tops of corals.

corculum-cardissa-heart-cockle-solomon-islands-1 — Two heart cockles embedded in the top of a *Porites* coral. Source: Reefbuilders

Heart cockles are a member of a small club of bivalves which partner with symbiotic algae for nutrition created by photosynthesis. Most of the modern photosymbiotic bivalves are in the family Cardiidae, the cockles. The giant clams (Tridacninae) are also in this family and have a similar partnership with the same genus of Symbiodinium algae. This algae is also found in many species of coral.

So when you find a live heart cockle, it is often green in color, because of the presence of this algae near the surface of its tissue. Its shell has adapted to be “windowed” (semi-transparent) to allow in light for the algae to harness to make sugars. The algae are housed in networks of tubes within the soft tissue of the cockle. They trade sugars with their host in exchange for nitrogen and carbon from the clam.

As I’ve mentioned before regarding the giant clams, this is a very productive partnership and has evolved separately several times in the history of bivalves. However, we don’t know why almost all examples of modern bivalve photosymbiosis occur in the cockles. Why aren’t the heart cockles giant like the giant clams? What features are necessary to allow this symbiosis to develop? These are the kind of questions I hope to help answer in my next few years of work.

Oh, the seasons they grow! [research blog]

On June 10, 2018June 10, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clams, Grad School, paleobiologyLeave a comment

My latest clamuscript is published in Palaios, coauthored with my advisor Matthew Clapham! It’s the first chapter of my PhD thesis, and it’s titled “Identifying the Ticks of Bivalve Shell Clocks: Seasonal Growth in Relation to Temperature and Food Supply.” I thought I’d write a quick post describing why I tackled this project, what I did, what I found out, and what I think it means! Raw unformatted PDF of it here on my publication page.

Why I did this project:

I study the growth bands of bivalve (“clam”) shells. Bivalves create light and dark shell growth bands as they grow their shells, much like the rings of a tree. The light bands form during happy times for the clam, when it is growing quickly and putting down lots of carbonate. The dark bands appear during times of cessation, when the bivalve ceases growth during a hibernation-like period. This can happen in the cold months, or the hot months, or both, or neither, depending on the clam and where it lives. It turns out that there are a lot of potential explanations for why these annual cessations of growth happen. Different researchers have suggested through the years that temperature (high or low) is the biggest control on the seasons that bivalves grow, but others have suggested that food supply is more important. Others say it’s mostly a function of the season they reproduce, when they’re putting most of their energy into making sperm/eggs and not growing their bodies. I wanted to try to see if I could find trends across all of bivalves which would shed light on which factors are important in determining their season of growth.

Annual growth lines in the shell of a giant clam. The transparent spots are the times that it was growing more slowly and not happy. Was this because of temperatures? Or was it getting less to eat? I wanted to know.

What I did:

I read a ton of papers in the historical literature about bivalves. These were written by people in many fields: aquaculture, marine ecology, paleoclimate researchers (using the clams shells as a chemical record of temperature), and more. All of the papers were united by describing the seasons that the bivalves grew, and the seasons that they stopped growing. I ended up with nearly 300 observations of marine (saltwater) bivalve growth for dozens of species from all around the world. I had papers as old as the earliest 1910s, and some as new as last year.

A map of all the places the observation of bivalve growth came from. Blue means they shut down in the winter, while red means they do not.

We have mussels, oysters, scallops, clams, cockles, geoducks, giant clams, razor clams, quahogs, and more in the database. Bivalves that burrow. Bivalves that sit on the surface of the sediment. Bivalves that stick onto rocks. Bivalves that can swim. With each, I noted data that the researchers recorded. If they grew during a season, I coded it as a 1. If they didn’t, I coded it as a 0. So a bivalve growing in summer but not winter would be recorded as 1,0. I also recorded environmental data including temperature of the location in winter and summer in the location, as well as seasonal supply of chlorophyll (a measure of phytoplankton, which is the main source of food for most clams). It turned out that not enough of the studies recorded temperature or chlorophyll for their sites, so I wanted to back these up with an additional data source. I downloaded satellite-based temperature and chlorophyll data for each location, as well as additional studies which directly measured chlorophyll at each site. I wanted lots of redundant environmental data to ensure that any trend or lack of trend I observed in my analysis was not due to a weakness of the data.

I then compared the occurrence of shutdown by season with these environmental variables using a statistical technique called regression. Regression basically involves trying to relate a predictor variable (in this case, latitude, temperature and chlorophyll during a certain season) to the response variable (did the clam grow in that season or not?). We wanted to see which environmental variable relates most closely to whether or not the clam grows or not. Because our dependent variable was binary (0 or 1), we used a technique called logistic regression, which tries to model the “log odds” of an event occurring in response to the predictor variable. That log odds can then be back-calculated to probability of the event occurring.

What we found:

In a clamshell, we found that latitude (distance from the equator) is a very good predictor of whether or not a bivalve shuts down for the winter. As you’d expect, bivalves in the far north and far south of our planet are more likely to take a winter nap. However, bivalves at the equator mostly grow year round and are not likely to take a summer nap. In relation to temperature, the lower the winter temperature, the more likely the bivalve is to stop shell growth. High summer temperature is not as good a predictor for the occurrence of a summer shutdown, but the majority of summer shutdowns seem to occur at the low temperate latitudes, where the difference between the annual range of temperature is largest. Unlike at the equator, where bivalves likely can adapt to the hottest temperatures and be happy clams, they have to adapt to a huge range of temperatures in places like the American Gulf and Atlantic coasts, the Adriatic and Gulf of California. And if they are restricted at the northward end of their range, they may have no choice but to shut down in summer as there is nowhere cooler to migrate to.

GIF of the satellite data showing white as hotspots of phytoplankton ability. Notice that the food is more available in summer months for each hemisphere. We were trying to see if this relates back to when the bivalves grow in every place we had data for.

Food supply, on the other hand, is not a good predictor of when bivalves shut down. When we went into this project, we expected food to be a powerful control on seasonal growth because it is intuitive and well understood that the better fed a bivalve is, the larger it will grow overall. But the seasonal low amount of chlorophyll (and therefore the amount of photosynthesizing plankton) in the bivalves’ areas had no relationship to whether or not the bivalve shut down in a certain season. To double check that this wasn’t a weakness in my satellite data, I downloaded additional direct observations from the same places as many bivalve studies in the dataset, but I still couldn’t find the relationship. We propose that the seasonal supply of phytoplankton is not well related to seasonal growth of bivalves because: 1) phytoplankton supply isn’t very seasonal in nature in most of the sites we studied. There are peaks in multiple seasons rather than a clean up and down wave shape like temperature. 2) Bivalves are pretty flexible in what they eat. They also eat other types of plankton and suspended particles that are even less seasonal. It may be pretty difficult to find bivalves that are seasonally starving. One of the most probable places to find such starvation shutdowns might be the poles, where seasonal ranges of temperature are quite small but plankton does really have a seasonal pattern of availability. More research will be needed to describe the nature of polar bivalves and why they shut down growth.

What’s next?
This is the first chapter of my PhD. I have two more chapters I’m working on, both related to the geochemistry of bivalve shells. I am writing those manuscripts this summer and looking for postdoctoral fellowships in the fall related to geochemistry of marine organisms in the fossil record. I hope to pursue more projects looking at the season of growth in bivalves, switching to understanding the role that changing seasonal cycles in their environment and biology play in their evolution. Do bivalves that live closer together tend to reproduce at different times? Can we track season of reproduction in relation to temperature and food supply? There are a lot more clam stories to be told and I look forward to sharing them all with you. Until the next research blog,

Dan

When a clam gets an offer it can’t refuse

On May 21, 2018May 21, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clams2 Comments

I study the giant clams, bivalves which can grow over three feet long and and are willingly “infected” by a symbiotic algae which they house in an altered stomach cavity. They provide their algae partners with nitrogen, a stable environment and even funnel light in their direction, and the algae happily share the fruit of their labor in the form of sugars. Imagine yourself swallowing algae, storing it in your gut and developing windows in your flesh to let light into your stomach. You’d never have to eat again. This is the growth hack that enables the giant clams to grow to unusual sizes. But it turns out that this lovely, beautiful partnership may not have started so peacefully. The algae may have made an offer the clam couldn’t refuse.

Top left: normal mussel. Top right: heavily infected L-shaped shell opening. Bottom: view of an algae-infected mussel, including close up of pearls. From Zuykov et al. 2018

A team from University of Quebec recently discussed what such a fresh infection looks like in mussels and it ain’t pretty. The mussels basically have their shells and bodies overgrown by parasitic Coccomyxa algae, leaving its flesh bright green and transforming its shell from the classic elongated, acute angled margin typical of Mytilus mussels into a strange L-shaped overhang. The more algae are present in the mussel, the more extreme this deformity becomes. The researchers propose that this is no accident, but that as they move in, the algae also manipulates the biochemical pathway that the mussel uses to create its shell.

Mussels, like all bivalves, create their shells by laying down calcium carbonate in layers at the outer edge of the shell. The calcium is sourced from salts in the water column and the carbon primarily comes from carbonate ions also available in the water. This reaction is easier when the pH of the clam’s internal fluid is higher (less acidic), and that is exactly what the algae may assist with. Algae like all plants take in carbon dioxide to use in photosynthesis, and in doing so they increase the pH of the mussel’s body fluid,

The authors note that the region of shell which experiences abnormal thickening in the infected mussels is also the most exposed to light. The Coccomyxa algae may be causing runaway calcification of shell in the regions that they infect, and even may be directly assisting with the calcification in an additional way through the action of an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase, which is used in both their photosynthesis and in shell production (I won’t get into the nitty gritty of that reaction here). But the calcification of the mussels does appear to be in overdrive, as infected mussels were also observed to make pearls!

The algae’s photosynthesis may be assisting the mussel’s shell formation, though overall these are still quite unhealthy organisms of lower weight than their uninfected brethren. Still, Coccomyxa is known to form symbioses with lichens and mosses, so it could be that with enough generations of collaboration and a bit of evolution, the harmful algal infection could become a much more mutually beneficial partnership. It’s not so far fetched to imagine that an ancestor of today’s giant clams got a bad case of gastritis and decided to make the best of a bad situation. Making a deal with their invaders, they became greater than the sum of their parts and evolved to be the giant hyper-calcifiers we know today.

Lessons of the Condors

On April 24, 2018April 24, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Biology, birdsLeave a comment

IMGP3706-01 — Condor 606 was born in Big Sur and regularly flies back and forth between there and Pinnacles.

Visiting Pinnacles National Park the other day, we were lucky to spot California condors several times. Their wingspan can reach up to 3 m. Their graceful flight is a sight to behold as they ride the warm updrafts of between the pinnacles of rock in the park, with their primary feathers bending up like a conductor’s fingers. Condors are the only remaining members of the genus Gymnogyps, which once contained five species. Four are only known from fossil specimens and went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene (~12,000 years ago), but Gymnogyps once ranged across the Americas. As such, the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) is a relic species; a survivor of a long but mostly extinct lineage.

By 1987, poaching, lead poisoning and habitat destruction had reduced the population to 27 individuals, of which 22 were captured and put into an emergency captive breeding program. In the thirty years since this project began, the population has increased to around 450 individuals. The program was expensive, painstaking and a massive undertaking. To this day, all captive-bred individuals are individually numbered and continually monitored. They even have a very adorable directory on the Pinnacles site where you can look each bird up by its number. We saw #606 and #463, and a couple others from farther away that we couldn’t read.

: Condor #463 was born at a breeding center in Idaho

California condors can be distinguished by the much more common turkey vultures by their underwing coloration, with large white patches at the front of the wings. I think that turkey vultures are fun to watch as they fly in circles over the highways searching for roadkill, but when you see a condor fly low over your head, it is awe-inspiring. Even the smaller juveniles have much larger, more pronounced heads than turkey vultures, and seem to fly even more effortlessly with a more gently curving V shape in their wings. We had stopped on the trail to discuss field markings for condors with another hiker when #463 soared over our heads, and we couldn’t help but jump for joy and hug each other at the privilege to see one of the famous condors ourselves.

Turkey vulture just checking if we were feeling ok as we sat in the shade.

As an advocate for invertebrate conservation, I have been known to unfairly poke fun at the human tendency to focus on large, charismatic megafauna for conservation as opposed to smaller and less exciting species that may make up more of an ecosystem’s biomass, or represent a more important link in the local food chain. Pandas have used up billions of conservation dollars, yet they are kind of an evolutionary oddball with their poorly evolved guts that can barely digest their chosen bamboo food, and their infamous failure to successfully mate. Koalas have a similar story. We reformed tuna fishing not out of concern for the fish, but because of concern for dolphins getting mistakenly caught. We tend to put a lot of time and effort into conserving species that we consider cute, or cool, or awe-inspiring. The condors are important decomposers of carcasses, ranging over huge distances in their search for food and efficiently returning the nutrients of dead animals back to the ecosystem. But the public outcry motivating their rescue was greatly helped by the fact that these creatures are incredibly impressive megafauna. If the turkey vulture was critically endangered, it might not get the same funding supporting its conservation.

This condor was very far away, gracefully circling the canyon.

But looking at the condors, my skepticism melted away and I was left with only gratitude that I was able to witness the grandeur of these beasts as they soared through the air; gratitude that I was able to see them myself and not only read about them in a book. I will never see a Steller’s Sea Cow, or a Great Auk, or a thylacine, or a dodo, because they disappeared before we realized what we were doing, and that extinction is a real and irreversible loss. Perhaps Gymnogyps won’t be around in 10,000 years. Their lineage originally evolved to feed on the giant carcasses from a collection of North American megafauna that is believed to have been hunted to death by humans (though that is a topic of endless debate). But if we hadn’t intervened to save the condors, we would have had to live with the guilt of knowing that we as a species committed the killing blow and did nothing to stop when we knew the reality of our crime. Instead we went to extreme lengths to save these unusual and majestic creatures because we feel empathy for them. As I watched condor 463 soar over my head, I felt relief, and pride, and hope. Success stories are important motivators for conservation, and I couldn’t help but think his wings were spelling out a “V” for victory as he flew away.

The insidious cost of increased class sizes: A TA’s perspective

On April 16, 2018 By Dan KillamIn Grad SchoolLeave a comment

UC Santa Cruz, like all UC schools, is in the midst of a massive regent-mandated effort to increase enrollment. In the face of a governor hostile to the idea of investing in education (despite his prior promises), the regents have decided that we are going to grow our way out of the budget shortfall. Much has been said about the foolishness of this plan from the standpoint of housing, student tuition and access to resources, but I thought I’d talk about the cost it has had on me personally as a Teaching Assistant (TA).

TAs are usually graduate students working on a doctorate or master’s degree. We are paid 50% wages on the assumption we spend 20 hours a week working on TA stuff to support our other 20 hours (ha!) of work a week on our thesis and classes. Our tuition is waived and we receive health benefits.

In the last two years, my department’s academic division has been cutting TAships while pressuring the department to enroll more students. For four years, I’ve been teaching the lab section for Environmental Geology (EART 20), which has given me a natural laboratory to note the impact that increased class size has had on my instruction. I’d also note that my experience has been less extreme than other TA’s because EART 20’s enrollment has been flat overall during the time I’ve taught. But the lab section has doubled in size from 22 to 45 students, possibly because we have more majors declaring and they need the lab credit for their degree.

Here are some ways my instruction has been impacted by doubling of students:

Grading time

As a TA, I am supposed to only spend 20 hours a week on instruction. I’m literally not allowed by my union to spend more time than that. And fortunately, because I have been able to slowly tweak my lesson plans over many years, I now have a lot less prep time than I did when I started teaching this class. The lesson plans are already put together, and I can just focus on polishing and perfecting the lessons. However, the time I need to grade has ballooned to at least double what it used to be. I say at least double, because I usually get tired after the 30th lab and start to slow down.

My detail in grading is also impacted because I cannot spend as much time looking and commenting on each student’s assignment. So while they’re paying higher tuition than their compatriots from four years ago, they are getting less instructor time dedicated to feedback on their work. Note that our department has tried to make up for this by hiring graders to assist TAs, but I insist on grading my own labs because I need to understand how students are learning and responding to my assigned material.

Less physical space for students

Our building used to have large, luxurious desks perfect for specimen-rich lab sections. But they unfortunately couldn’t fit more than 20 students in a room with those so they have put in smaller, flimsy desks to stuff more students in. These desks are narrow and crammed together to allow up to 30 students in the room. As a lab instructor, I prefer to walk around and answer student questions looking at the specimen we’re talking about until they understand and have that light-bulb moment. But I can’t do that anymore because the desks are so close together. So instead I now sit at the front of the room and they come up to me. I hate this and I know I get less questions than I would if I could walk around. It is another way that they aren’t getting their money’s worth.

Less interactivity

The UC claims to be a big cheerleader for the active learning style of teaching. Active learning is different than the classic lecture-based format in that exercises are designed to maximize student participation and interactivity between the student and instructor, hopefully leading to learning by experience rather than example. But active learning requires more grading time and a different classroom layout than the classic lecture format. And I have had to revise my labs over the years to reduce interactivity out of necessity. In the past, I’ve made a landscape out of play-dough for students to map out topographic profiles. This year, there were just too many students for it to work. They scrunched together around the model, with some deciding to wait until my office hours to get time doing it. It was sad to watch this. Next time, I’ll make two models to space through the room so it isn’t so claustrophobic.

Take-away

These problems are only going to get worse, as our department is currently under pressure to increase enrollment and has less TAships to offer every year. We are often criticized for our low student to instructor ratio! Yet tuition is increasing. Students are getting less value for the same course offered four years ago. I’ve observed it with my own eyes. I feel a pang of sadness each lab section seeing the ways it reduces the quality of instruction. I spend more time to try to lessen the impact of these creeping changes, but something’s got to give. I hope Californians realize that the value of our legendary UC schools is under attack. I hope we invest more into education and don’t forget that the UCs helped make our state great. I hope Jerry Brown cements his legacy by increasing UC funding.