Concurring with The Onion: There Absolutely Nothing We Can Learn from Clams

Screencap of Onion where some sort of scientist is announcing something in front of a Powerpoint slide of a clam

Last week, The Onion, a very serious journalistic publication, published a piece “Biologists Announce There Absolutely Nothing We Can Learn From Clams“. As a print subscriber I want to say I played a small part in this article, which I’ve actually hung on my office wall. But I want to take it a step further and write a line-by-line concurrence with everything they wrote!

WOODS HOLE, MA—Saying they saw no conceivable reason to bother with the bivalve mollusks, biologists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution announced Thursday that there was absolutely nothing to be learned from clams.

Wow, I do know a researcher who studies clams at Woods Hole and actually love her work! Nina Whitney is now a prof at Western Washington University but until recently was a postdoc studying how shells can serve as records of climate! I wonder who The Onion interviewed.

“Our studies have found that while some of their shells look pretty cool, clams really don’t have anything to teach us,” said the organization’s chief scientist, Francis Dawkins, clarifying that it wasn’t simply the case that researchers had already learned everything they could from clams, but rather that there had never been anything to learn from them and never would be.

Oh I don’t know a Francis Dawkins, but I’m sure they know their clams! It is true that their shells can look pretty cool. Bivalves include everything from Hysteroconcha dione, with its beautiful color and spines, to Tridacna gigas, which grows to 4.5 feet and weighs hundreds of pounds! And like an Onion, shells have growth layers, sometimes a new one every day, which someone could use to try to figure out how clams record what they eat and how the environment changes. But why would anyone do that?

Close-up view of a Hysteroconcha bivalve shell, showcasing its intricate ridges and coloration, and rows of long spines near the margin. Source

For me, I guess I haven’t learned anything from clams. I think I already knew in my heart that clams can live for >500 years. I already knew that mussels can filter several liters of water an hour, meaning that a colony of them can filter hundreds of thousands of liters an hour. All this stuff is obvious, actually. Common sense.

“We certainly can’t teach them anything. It’s not like you can train them to run through a maze the way you would with mice. We’ve tried, and they pretty much just lie there.

It is ludicrous that clams could be taught anything or have anything approaching memory or thinking. It is only coincidence that scallops appear to clap their valves to swim, using their hundreds of eyes to navigate to a new location away from predators or toward food. It’s coincidence that they increase their feeding activity when shown a video of food particles. Some researchers have even claimed that giant clams can tell the difference between different shapes of objects! It is so dumb!

From what I’ve observed, they have a lot more in common with rocks than they do with us. They’re technically alive, I guess, if you want to call that living.

Also literally true! Their shell is a biomineral, in essence a living rock, made of calcium carbonate. They are alive in the sense they have a heart that beats, pushing hemolymph around their body. Their heart rate can increase or decrease with different stressors. Remember though, we always knew this. We didn’t learn it through something like science.

They open and close sometimes, but, I mean, so does a wallet. If you’ve used a wallet, you know more or less all there is to know about clams. Pretty boring.”

I myself have wasted time studying this. I attached sensors to giant clams to monitor their feeding activity. If I had learned anything, it might have been that they change their behavior between day and night, basking in the sun to help their photosynthetic algae in the day, and partially closing at night, with those behaviors changing based on how much chlorophyll is in the water. But remember! I didn’t learn it.

The finding follows a study conducted by marine biologists last summer that concluded clams don’t have much flavor, either, tasting pretty much the same as everything else on a fried seafood platter.

I can’t see how anyone would like to eat a bivalve. Especially not a fresh-caught scallop sauteed in butter or a plate of fried clams in New England. Never try that. Leave it to me!