Thoughts of a clam

On June 2, 2019June 2, 2019 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clams, Uncategorized13 Comments

To us active, dynamic mammals, the humble clam can appear positively…inanimate. Their nervous system is decentralized relative to ours, lacking any sort of brain, and to the untrained eye, it can appear that their only discernible reaction to the outside world is opening or closing. Open = happy, closed = not happy; end of story, right? Some vegans even argue that the clams are so nonsentient that it is okay to eat them and think of them as having no more agency than a vegetable!

You might already have predicted I intend to tell you about just how animate and sentient clams can be. But let’s start out by describing the nuts and bolts of their nervous system. As with many invertebrates, their nervous system is distributed throughout their body as a system of ganglia. Ganglia are clumps of nerve cells which may have local specialization, and transmit messages within neurons using electrical potentials. At the connection between cells (called a synapse), neurotransmitters are used to pass signals to the next cell. Researchers have found that bivalves use “histamine‐, octopamine‐, gamma‐aminobutyric acid‐ (GABA)…like immunoreactivity” in their central and peripheral nervous systems, much like us vertebrates do, and other studies have even found that the response to serotonin and dopamine is localized in nervous tissue linked to different organ systems.

Nerve cells (bright green) highlighted in a larval oyster with fluorescent dye (from Yurchenko et al 2018)

These systems of chemical nerve transmission are truly ancient, likely dating back to the formation of complex animal body plans in the earliest Cambrian. Researchers have great interest in studying these nervous and hormonal signaling systems in mollusks because they can shed light on the relative flexibility and limitations of these systems throughout the animal tree of life. Characterizing these systems can also allow us to understand the mechanisms that bivalves and other animals use to react to environmental stimuli.

poly-gill-detailsem — Electron microscope view of gill cilia, zoomed in 1000x (from Dan Hornbach)

Like humans, bivalves spend a lot of time and effort eating. Most bivalves eat by filtering food from passing water with tiny cilia on their gills. These cilia work to capture food particles and also act as a miniature rowing team moving water along the gill surface. The bivalve needs a way to control this ciliar activity, and researchers found they could directly control the speed at which oysters move their cilia by dosing them with serotonin and dopamine, which respectively increased and decreased activity.

Bivalves also work very hard to make babies. Most bivalves reproduce by releasing sperm and eggs to fertilize externally in the water column. To maximize their chances to find a mate, they typically save up their reproductive cells in gonads for multiple months and release them in a coordinated mass spawning event. It appears that this process is controlled by hormonal releases of dopamine and serotonin. Researchers have determined that serotonin concentrations vary through the year, with mussels in New England using it to regulate a seasonal cycle of feeding in summer, followed storing of that energy for winter. During the winter when food is less available, they use that stored energy to bulk up their gonads in time for reproductive release in spring months, when their larvae have plentiful access to food and oxygen, ensuring them the best chance of survival. In recent decades, aquaculturists have learned to use serotonin injections to induce spawning in cultured clams, to ensure they will have a harvest ready at a certain time of year.

So bivalves are very sensitive to the seasons. How about shorter term sources of excitement? You might have observed this yourself through the clam’s most iconic activity: opening and closing its shell. Clams close their shells with powerful adductor muscles which pull the two valves together. A springy ligament at the hinge pulls the shell open when the muscles relax. Just like us, the clam needs to use nerve cells to signal the muscle to do its thing. In addition, two different sets of ganglia act to control the foot that some bivalves can extend to dig into sand, with one ganglion acting to extend the foot and the other causing it to contract. While clams don’t have a centralized brain with specialized regions for different uses like we have, this represents a sort of specialization of neural systems with a similar result.

Clam licking salt - Imgur — This iconic gif is often shared along with the claim it shows a clam “licking” salt. It is actually using its foot to search for a place to dig. The salt was not needed.

When a certain neuron is used repeatedly, it can form a cellular memory allowing the organism to acclamate (ugh sorry) and moderate its response to a particular stimulus over time. Giant clams, for example, close their shells when their simple eyes detect a shadow overhead. This behavior can protect them from predation. When I conducted some of my PhD research, sampling body fluid of aquarium and wild giant clams with a syringe, I noticed that captive clams didn’t close up in response to my shadow overhead, while wild clams required me to sneak up and wedge their shells open with a wooden block to do my work. I suspected that after exposure to frequent feedings and water changes by aquarists, the clam had “learned” that there was no reason to expend energy closing its shell. Meanwhile, in the process of proving that our sampling technique was not harmful to the animal, I discovered that clams which detected my shadow would quickly reopen within seconds when I hid from them, while those that were stuck by a syringe would stay closed for minutes before opening and beginning to feed again. Makes sense!

Other researchers noticed this phenomenon as well. One group found that giant clams repeatedly exposed to shadows of different sizes, shell tapping and even directly touching its soft tissue began to habituate (become accustomed) to the stress, opening more quickly and staying open longer each time the stimulus occurred. Even more interestingly, they did not transfer that habituation between stress types; for example, the clams that saw a shadow again and again would still react strongly to a different stress like tapping its shell. This suggests the animal can distinguish between different threats along a spectrum of seriousness, with touching of tissue (similar to a fish pecking at its flesh) being the most serious threat with the most dramatic response.

Another study determined that larger giant clams stayed closed longer than smaller ones in response to the same threat. They proposed this was related to the greater risk large clams face as they have more tissue area vulnerable to attack. While the clams might not have made a “conscious” decision in the way we do as thinking creatures, they were able to place their individual risk in context and vary their response. This ability to tailor a response to different risk levels is a sign of surprisingly complex neurology at work.

Inside the Scallop — Close up of the eyes of a scallop. Each is a tiny crystalline parabolic mirror (photo by Matthew Krummins on Wikipedia)

Scallops show some of the most complex bivalve behaviors. This relates back to their unique adaptations, including simple eyes that can resolve shapes and the ability to swim away from danger. Scallops have been found to discern between predator types by sight alone, to the extent that they did not initially recognize an invasive new predatory seastar as a threat. When swimming, they are capable of using this vision to navigate to places where they can hide, such as seagrass beds. It would be very interesting to compare the behavior of scallops in marine protected areas to those that can be freely harvested. Do they vary their behavior in response?

I hope I’ve made clear that while clams are not exactly intellectual powerhouses, their behavior is much more complicated than simply sucking up water and opening or closing their shells. Like us, they inhabit a complex environment that requires a multitude of responses. Their nervous systems have evolved to allow them to survive and adopt nuanced behaviors which they can vary on the fly, and which us “higher” animals are only just beginning to comprehend.

How does a scallop swim?

On February 13, 2019February 13, 2019 By Dan KillamIn clams5 Comments

uelx7yhbixf01 — Scallops spooked by divers’ lights and fleeing en masse to filter somewhere else

The ocean is a place of constant dynamic movement. Fish use their fins to push water away from themselves, and because every action has an equal and opposite reaction, they therefore move forward. Some cephalopods use jet propulsion, constricting their mantle cavity to push water out through siphons, allowing them to jet forward like a deflating balloon. And other life forms sail the seas on constantly moving currents , indirectly harnessing the power of the sun and earth.

Bivalves are a fairly sedentary bunch by comparison. While most bivalves have a planktonic larval form, when they settle they are constrained to a fairly small area within which they can burrow or scramble around with their muscular feet.

graybountifulgopher-size_restricted

But some bivalves have evolved to move at a quicker rate. The most famous swimming bivalves are the scallops, which have evolved to use jet propulsion, similar to their very distantly related cephalopod relatives. But unlike the cephalopods, scallops evolved to use their hinged shells to aid this process!

wyjgzzw — Notice the expelled water disturbing the sediment below the scallop as it “claps” its way forward!

Many filter-feeding bivalves use their shell valves as a biological bellows to pull in water for the purposes of sucking in food, or even to aid in digging, but scallops have developed another use for this activity, to enable propulsion. Scallops draw in water by opening their valves to create a vacuum which draws in water to their sealed mantle cavity. They then rapidly close their valves using their strong adductor muscles to pull them together, which pushes the water back through vents in the rear hinge area, propelling the scallop forward.

esn6uyb — Don’t panic if a scallop swims toward you. They can see, but not super well. This one is just confused.

Using this strategy, scallops can evade predators and distribute themselves to new feeding sites. It’s a surprisingly effective swimming technique, with the queen scallop able to move 37 cm/second, or over five body lengths per second! Michael Phelps would have to swim at nearly 35 km/h to match that relative speed (his actual highest speed is around 1/3 of that). I’m sure sustaining that speed would be tiring for Mr. Phelps, though, and it’s the same for scallops, only using their swimming for short-distance swims.

(video from Supplemental Materials of Robertson et al. 2019)

A recent paper from a team in Switzerland just came out describing an effort to engineer a robot which imitates the scallop’s elegant and simple swimming method. The resulting totally adorable “RoboScallop” closely imitates the design of a scallop, using a pair of hinged valves with rear openings to allow the movement of water backward. The internal cavity is sealed by a rubber membrane draped across the front so that all water is forced through these rear vents when the Roboscallop snaps shut.

Diagram from the Roboscallop paper (from Robertson et al. 2019)

As seen in the diagram above, the rhythm and relative velocity of opening vs closing is important to make sure the RoboScallop actually moves forward. If the scallop opened as quickly as it closed, it would just rock back in forth. It instead opens slowly so that it does not draw itself backward at the same rate that it can push itself forward. The researchers had to do quite a bit of calibration to get these rates right (equating to about 1.4 “claps” per second), but once they did, they ended up with a RoboScallop that can generate about the same force of forward movement (1 Newton) as a real scallop (1.15 Newtons), and similar rates of speed.

This paper really fascinated me because it is merely the latest in a long line of successful engineering projects imitating the ingenuity of evolution. Other marine robots have been made which emulate the locomotion of fish, manta rays, sea snakes and other forms of swimming. And now we have a clam! Let me know when I can buy one to play with in my pool.

Mystery of the “spurting” mussels

On November 21, 2018November 11, 2019 By Dan KillamIn Biology, clams2 Comments

If you’ve read any of my posts, you should realize by now that clams are pretty weird. Some catch live prey. Some have algae in their bodies that they “farm” for food. Some can bore into hard rock. Some sail the seas on rafts of kelp. Clams live in a competitive world and have had hundreds of millions of years of time to evolve to try out all sorts of weird, unlikely ways of life.

unio_crassus3_a_mrkvicka — *U. crassus* in a Slovenian river (Alexander Mrkvicka)

The thick shelled river mussel (Unio crassus) is known from many rivers and streams of Central Europe. As this is a very well-studied region of the world, many generations of academics have noted an unusual, seemingly inexplicable behavior undertaken by these mussels at certain times of year.

20_u-crassus_2 — *U. crassus* propped up on its foot (UCforLife)

Using its muscular foot, U. crassus pulls itself to the edges of the streams and rivers it lives in until it is partially exposed to air. It orients itself at a right angle with the surface of the stream with its siphons (two little snorkels coming out of the shell) facing out towards the water. Like all bivalves, U. crassus can act as a bellows by opening and closing its shell to pull in and push out water through those siphons. It has one siphon above the water and one below, and it proceeds to suck in water and spray it into the center of the stream using the power of its suction. The water can travel over a meter away and they continue this spurting about once a minute, sometimes for hours.

squirt — Squirting water into the stream! (Vicentini 2005)

Needless to say, this is a very strange and unlikely behavior to observe in a mussel. It is exposing itself to potential dessication or suffocation from exposure to air. It is vulnerable to predation from terrestrial mammals and birds. There has to be a very powerful benefit from this behavior to outweigh those risks. And why squirt water into the air?

Some researchers proposed that the mussels were traveling to shore to harvest from the more plentiful food particles deposited there. But why would they face their siphons away from the shore then? Other workers suggested that it was a way to reduce heat stress through evaporation, though that also seems unlikely, considering the water is warmest in the shallows. The question persisted for decades in the minds of curious malacologists.

squirttop — Top-down view of spurting behavior (Vicentini 2005)

In 2005, Heinrich Vicentini of the Swiss Bureau for Inland Fisheries and Freshwater Ecology decided to try settle the question of why these mussels spurt. He observed several dozen of the mussels crawl to the edge of the water and diligently begin squirting into the streams. In the name of science, he put himself in the path of these squirts, caught the water and used a hand lens to observe that the squirted water was full of mussel larvae (glochidia).

Lifecyle of U. crassus (Rita Larje via UCforLife)

U. crassus falls in the order Unionida, a group of freshwater mussels distinguished by a very unusual method of reproduction. They are parasites! Because they can’t swim well enough to colonize upstream against the current, they need to rely on fish to hitch a ride. Some have evolved elaborate lures to convince fish to take a bite, then allowing them to release their larvae, which attach to the fish’s gills like binder clips and ride all the way upstream. Once they have reached their destination, they detach and grow up into more conventional burrowing mussels. It’s a weird, creepy and wonderfully brilliant strategy that enabled the mussels to invade the inland rivers which would otherwise be inaccessible to them.

5_anodonta-glochidia-on-roach — Loach (type of freshwater fish) gills with unionid larvae attached (UCforLife)

The mussels appear to be spurting out not only water, but their babies. They gain a couple of advantages from this. For one, their larvae can distribute further than would be possible from the bottom of the creek. Instead, they are released at the center of the surface of the stream, where they can be carried for a much longer distance by the current before they settle at the bottom. In addition, the splash of water on the surface may mimic the behavior of insects and other fish food falling in the water. A curious minnow might venture to investigate the source of the splash, where it would promptly breathe in a cloud of larvae that get stuck on its gills. A pretty rude surprise, but a brilliant trick to give the baby mussels the best chance of surviving.

So again, clams prove themselves to be far more clever and interesting than they might initially seem. U. crassus and other members of the Unionida are an ancient and globally distributed lineage which have evolved all sorts of weird and wonderful ways to maintain their river lifestyle. Unfortunately, rivers are some of the most widely damaged environments in the world. A majority of freshwater mussel species worldwide including U. crassus are endangered by habitat loss, overharvesting and pollution. But more research into their unusual biology can help us understand ways we can enhance their conservation, with the hope of providing more habitat for them to recover populations in the future. New projects in Sweden and other countries aim to recover habitat for their larvae to settle along 300 km of rivers, and research the fish species which their larvae prefer to hitch a ride on. With more work, we can hopefully ensure that the streams of Europe will harbor little mini super-soakers for millennia to come.

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