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Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

polishnews.co.uk

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Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#61

Post by knuthsat »

dfischer wrote: post #54

This is an odd form of cross species slavery. It’s one thing to agree to the conditions and another to force it upon life. This... has a lot to contemplate. Service dogs don’t agree but there is an essence of joy there. Can you feel a clams emotions? I guess at this point you get close to the contemplation of plant life. There’s one thing to kill life and use it for food and then another to use it as a test for poiso…

I thought that mussels and bivalves are like plants, there's no central nervous system and nothing else allowing them to be capable of consciousness.

Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#62

Post by air7 »

luckman212 wrote: post #56
dinkleberg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's rational or not, especially since I'm sure there are plenty of microplastics and pollutants in everything else, but I've completely removed filters & anything whole like shrimp from my diet. I enjoy shrimp and scallops, but honestly I feel like given my current knowledge it's not worth it. Maybe we'll find out that all the microplastics in the ocean are totally fine, but better safe than sorry in…

Are the microplastics just in the ocean though? I thought they were turning up just about everywhere now, even human placentas[0] [0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

Yeah. Major sources of everyday microplastics are: 1. Washing synthetic clothes in the washing machine 2. Normal wear and tear of tires

This made me go from being very alarmed to the realization that if these things causes major harm, we would have undoubtedly known about it by now

Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#63

Post by bumbada »

gumby wrote: post #47
kull wrote: post #43

For those who love eating clams and just like myself wonder how safe it is to eat clams, while they filter huge amount of water -- yes, it would be like eating a used filter, that's why clams that you get in restaurants must be grown in very clean water [1]. [1] https://www.thurstoncountywa.gov/planning/planningdocuments/...

I am squeamish about eating any used filters: bivalves of any sort (and other filter feeders), liver, kidney... People have been doing so for a long time which is why I use the term "squeamish" which implies some lack of rationality. I thought oysters were "purified" by putting them in a bucket of clean water overnight. Myth?

It is a very rational thought.

People have been eating used filters for millions of years. In particular, just 60 years ago you could find small clams almost in any beach and we believe homo erectus ate those.

But just less than 80 years ago, rivers started carrying all kind of new chemical compounds, like mines' waste, from coal cleaning particles to mercury and cadmium compounds.

Then we added other chemicals like detergents, or machine oils, or silver halides from photography, plastifiers and plastic or resins synthesis residues, Hormones like "the pill", fertilizers, heavy metals like Pb, industrial acids, pharmaceutical residues and I could go on and on.

In some places like in the Mediterranean sea clams just have been dissolved by acid waters or pollution just killed most of them.

This is specially true in the river mouth of big industrial rivers.

It is not lack of rationality, quite the contrary, people with information,like those that do quality analysis of waters will never eat things like fish coming out of some of them.

Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#64

Post by peterburkimsher »

Dwolb wrote: post #52
girvo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IoM: Internet of mollusks. I know we’re being tongue in cheek, but I do wonder if there is anyway to actually use them as online sensors without causing too much undue harm?

If there’s anything I love about working in the IoT space, it’s the variety of applications people work on. I’m pretty sure we’ve seen shrimp farming applications but no mollusks yet.

The prototype will be run on shell scripts.

Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#65

Post by bawana »

brnt wrote: post #10
smiley1437 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 teams of 8 clams (mussels) If the water quality is normal, the clams open and close randomly. If all 8 clams close, something is off with the water and prompts more investigation. They get the clams from a nearby lake, and somewhat comfortingly, they retire them back to the lake when they've done a tour of duty. They're even marked so they don't reuse the same clams! Nice to hear that they don't just euthanize them…

It's not a sign of softness that you take a (minimal) effort to save a lifeform (that was useful to you). It's basic humanity, for lack of a better term (animality?).

Interesting it is that our civilization is becoming more sensitive to smaller perturbations the larger it gets and the better information flow it achieves

Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#66

Post by beowulfey »

air7 wrote: post #62
luckman212 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the microplastics just in the ocean though? I thought they were turning up just about everywhere now, even human placentas[0] [0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

Yeah. Major sources of everyday microplastics are: 1. Washing synthetic clothes in the washing machine 2. Normal wear and tear of tires This made me go from being very alarmed to the realization that if these things causes major harm, we would have undoubtedly known about it by now

Generally foreign contaminants introduce chronic immune responses. A rise in autoimmune disorders could potentially be a result. Or perhaps a single particle has a small chance of inducing cancer in a cell that endocytically engulfs it. In a situation like these the effects of low numbers will be small and hard to attribute to the source but that doesn’t mean it won’t continue to make it much worse for us.

Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#67

Post by andylynch »

AnHonestComment wrote: post #48
girvo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IoM: Internet of mollusks. I know we’re being tongue in cheek, but I do wonder if there is anyway to actually use them as online sensors without causing too much undue harm?

Why not just point a webcam at a bed of them? You can do image analysis to count the shellfish in the image, and attach an “open” or “closed” status to each. Once you have a reliable field of Boolean values, you can detect anomalies in the close count. You could then have a grid of tanks with inlets from the clean water supply and outlets to the sewer where you monitored (more or less real time) the reaction to our c…

Looks like they are using magnetic sensors, this would would very simply, similar to the ones on doors for burglar alarms.

Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#68

Post by brnt »

bourgoin wrote: post #34
brnt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a sign of softness that you take a (minimal) effort to save a lifeform (that was useful to you). It's basic humanity, for lack of a better term (animality?).

Maybe "animal husbandry" is the term you're looking for?

That's something else I think.

Re: Clams filter the water and check whether the water is polluted or clean

#70

Post by dccoolgai »

corty wrote: post #42
dccoolgai wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The water being crystal clear looks cool, but it's an ecological disaster for larger fish in the food chain that depend on the turbidity of the water for ambushing smaller fish.

Crystal clear water also means that there is a scarcity of nutrients, otherwise algae would grow. But this isn't necessarily a desaster, not all lakes are equal in their conditions for various species. This might just be what the lakes looked like for the longest time. Btw., there are large fish hunting smaller ones in clear water. Most extreme example are sharks.

Most freshwater species are "ambush predators". Edges, shadows, eddies, etc. That's why those things are generally more productive fishing spots. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that even larger shark species tend to hunt around edges like thermoclines.
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