I had no idea clams lived this long. I would have guessed they lived a matter of a season or two with the way they give clamming licenses out at Wellfleet. I just listened to the story on NPR where the scientist said they had to kill it to determine the age. "There's lot more around up in Greenland," he explained when the host queried their actions.
And sure, you bloody scientists will kill them all too--a contest to find the oldest will ensue. Why do we need to know a clam's age? If it isn't polite to ask about age, where's the good manners in killing them to determine it.
How would the marine biologist like it if we cut him up to count his rings?
ET-phone home.
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Having heard the same report, I'm of mixed minds about the project myself. As a vegetarian (albeit the lazy aka lacto-ovo sort), I don't have the guilt that might come with eating the poor bivalve in a stew or chowder, but I can see where harvesting some of them to get a baseline in condition changes in the Arctic Ocean can be valuable. Just call me a chordate chauvinist, with special dispensation for the octopuses and just maybe the squids for having eyes like ours only better.
Damn, that's a rational explanation just when I didn't want one. I wanted it to be about evil scientists and experiments in secret laboraties. But then evil scientists can always make their work seem rational.
But you are right Patti. The race to find the oldest may be coming next. That's what happened with the oldest tree - a guy took a core sample and found it to be about 4,600 years old. Then a Ph.D. student went to the same area, found a likely candidate and failed to get a core sample. That's when the chainsaw came out. The strange part? He had the chainsaw in the truck. Malice aforethought? I'd say so.
The real race might be for the oldest Ph.D. student. We had one hit eighty before he finished and another in his early seventies.
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