Saturday, August 16, 2014

Fun Facts About Clams

Hello clam lovers!  I'm back with some facts you may not know about clams:
  1. The biggest clam can grow up to six feet in diameter!  What a meal that would be.
  2. The word "clam" is actually short for a longer Italian word, "clamantino"!
  3. Did you know that there are more than 7 different varieties of clams?
  4. Clams are the most salt-succulent of the molluscs, and do not need much/any salt added if you are planning to eat them (which you should)
  5. Clam trawlers usually trawl in pairs to mitigate risk.
  6. Finding a boot in with recently-dredged clams is actually a sign of good luck -- this is largely due to the fact that clams have a foot, and the boot is therefore seen as a sacrifice from the clams.
  7. Clams have a foot, which should be its own fact.
Do you have a fact about clams?  Leave a comment!

Monday, August 11, 2014

Clam fossils offer 10,000 year history of El Nino Southern Oscillation

It seems like every day, clams are helping us better understand our world!  Scientists in Peru are using clam fossils to track weather patterns ten thousand years ago.  Crazy stuff:
People have been living on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in Peru for a long time, and as they've done so, they've eaten clams, tossing the shells onto waste areas that grew to become huge mounds over thousands of years. In this new effort, the researchers dug down into several such mounds and extracted clam fossils they found, along with dirt and charcoal—remnants of ancient fires used to cook the clam meat. By taking measurements of oxygen isotopes in the , the researchers were able to calculate ocean  at two to four week intervals throughout the lives of the individual clams, while radiocarbon dating of the dirt and charcoal revealed when the clams made their way into the mound. Examining multiple clams at different depths in the mounds allowed for creating a historical record of , and that allowed for charting the cycle of the ENSO going back ten thousand years.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-08-clam-fossils-year-history-el.html#jCp
Truly, science is going in the right direction.