First one’s free!
4 Likes
Yuppers.
2 Likes
“soak up environmental contaminants into their tissues in large concentrations”
While this can mean the shellfish become unsafe to eat. And in extreme cases can kill off populations in surprisingly large areas. This is actually a good thing. Shellfish filter an astonishing amount of water, and they pull contaminants out. Which bioacumulate in their bodies. But then they die. Rot. And those contaminants become sequestered in the ocean floor.
Shellfish aquaculture and seeding shellfish to increase localized populations is one of the only practical methods. And a really, really, effective one. For cleaning pollution out of sea water. This stuff is in the mussels sure. But that means there’s less of it in the water. And throwing a bunch more mussels, oysters, and clams into the area could practically eliminate it from the water column over time.
Its the central idea behind things like The Billion Oyster Project. And there are similar proposals to use Oysters to clean up some of the massively polluted water ways around San Francisco and the Bay Area. It’d take decades of repeatedly seeding until a population was established. And longer for them to become edible. But you end up restoring a otherwise tanked water way and establishing profitable industry by the end of it.
7 Likes
Fair enough. It’s always a risk.
2 Likes
Can you really call Mars an ecosystem, though?
“Even a featureless radioactive billiard ball of a planet has an ecology, albeit not a complex one.”
Source: Joe Haldeman’s excellent novel Mindbridge (1976), one of my very favorite read-once-a-year-or-so books.
Edit: Added link.
2 Likes
Here’s a documentary about it.
3 Likes
Talk about a mussel relaxer…
14 Likes
But are mussels as happy as a clam without the opioids?
5 Likes
Is this just my bias or does it seems odd that there is such clamber over the opioid crisis yet the administration is ok with American schools becoming shooting galleries for twisted misfits? Black men and boys in particular are routine targets for cops to kill pretty much just because they like to shoot people. And really, brutality is heaped on brown kids and their families because they have the nerve to come here and hope they can escape the savagery of their home countries. Own concern is that opioids are being misused? OK I agree there is a problem but where the hell is the outrage about People of color being targets? Will body armor be on the school shopping list.
Our response is to make prescription pain killer almost impossible to get. People with devastating pain can just piss off. Meanwhile China is struggling to pour enough fentanyl through the mail. Boy, we have some fucked up priorities as a nation. Maybe what we need are some more inane Amazon gadgets to order our fucking toilet paper for us while those less able to protect themselves are moving targets.
3 Likes
But it’s usually the fish that get hooked…
2 Likes
Why are these Puget Sound bivalve molluscs trying to take our jobs ?
1 Like
Baked clams?
2 Likes
Mussels a la Narcan
You can snort muscles, which are basically the same.
To go much further back, I believe that lithium was part of the original 7-Up formula. Not even going to say a word about Coke.
2 Likes
The headlines, both here and in my local paper, omit the fact that there were no shellfish in those waters until the scientists trucked them in from an aquaculture farm.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
