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When you think of mussels and clams and other bivalve animals, you might think of something as shelled and static, perhaps sitting on your plate at a fancy restaurant. But before the mussel got to your plate, it led a life—and all things considered, a surprisingly active one.
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/hankgreen
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Music by Andrew Huang:
https://www.youtube.com/andrewhuang
Journey to the Microcosmos is a Complexly production.
Find out more at https://www.complexly.com
Stock video from:
https://www.videoblocks.com
SOURCES:
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bivalve.html
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.214.4523.911
https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Bivalvia/
https://www.emsl.pnnl.gov/news/drawing-inspiration-muscle-mussel-foot
https://www.thoughtco.com/byssal-byssus-threads-2291697
https://www.npr.org/2010/03/05/124319594/mighty-mussels-have-industrial-strength
https://www.fao.org/3/y5720e/y5720e07.htm
https://newportbay.org/wildlife/marine-life/filter-feeders/
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/BF01319711
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.4319/lo.1993.38.2.0265
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261742184_The_Utility_of_In_vivo_Observations_for_Describing_Particle_Capture_Processes_in_Suspension-Feeding_Bivalve_Molluscs
Follow Journey to the Microcosmos:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/journeytomicro
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JourneyToMicro
Shop The Microcosmos:
https://www.microcosmos.store
Support the Microcosmos:
http://www.patreon.com/journeytomicro
More from Jam’s Germs:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jam_and_germs
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn4UedbiTeN96izf-CxEPbg
Hosted by Hank Green:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hankgreen
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/vlogbrothers
Music by Andrew Huang:
https://www.youtube.com/andrewhuang
Journey to the Microcosmos is a Complexly production.
Find out more at https://www.complexly.com
Stock video from:
https://www.videoblocks.com
SOURCES:
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bivalve.html
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.214.4523.911
https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Bivalvia/
https://www.emsl.pnnl.gov/news/drawing-inspiration-muscle-mussel-foot
https://www.thoughtco.com/byssal-byssus-threads-2291697
https://www.npr.org/2010/03/05/124319594/mighty-mussels-have-industrial-strength
https://www.fao.org/3/y5720e/y5720e07.htm
https://newportbay.org/wildlife/marine-life/filter-feeders/
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/BF01319711
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.4319/lo.1993.38.2.0265
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261742184_The_Utility_of_In_vivo_Observations_for_Describing_Particle_Capture_Processes_in_Suspension-Feeding_Bivalve_Molluscs
When you think of, like mussels and clams and other bivalve animals, you might think of something like this.
Sheltered and static, and perhaps sitting on your plate at a fancy restaurant. But before the mussel got to your plate, it led a life— and all things considered, a surprisingly active one.
Like the animals themselves, the word “bivalve” seems simple enough. These are mollusks made from a shell that is hinged in two parts, which are called valves. But the diversity of bivalves is vast, encompassing an array of animals like clams, mussels, scallops, and oysters that are found in all sorts of watery habitats.
Some have even been found in hydrothermal vents deep in the sea. Now luckily, because bivalves are so widespread, we didn’t have to travel as far as a deep sea hydrothermal vent to find one. These samples came to us from the Black Sea.
And when James, our master of microscopes, first saw them in his samples, they were just tiny black dots on seaweed. They were so small that he thought they were sand grains… until he noticed that one of those little black dots was moving! Putting those dots under the microscope and finding a tiny shelled creature was an exciting surprise.
But we here at Journey to the Microcosmos are not experts in the ways of bivalves. So we decided to reach out to someone who is an expert: J. Evan Ward, Professor and Head of the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut.
And one of the things Evan told us after we showed him our videos is that it is hard to tell exactly what bivalve species we are looking at because these are young bivalves, which are called spat. When bivalves reproduce, they produce larvae, which can then develop through different life strategies depending on the species. Some will become pests to fish, others just simply grow.
But eventually, they develop into spat. And Evan told us that most bivalve spat are pretty active because they have a very important goal in mind: they’re trying to find a place to settle down, so they have to move around to find a good home. So how long they remain a spat will depend on the conditions of the water around them.
And at the size ours seem to be, Evan estimated that if it were summer and they had plenty of food, they would likely grow out of this stage in just a few weeks and become juveniles. One of the ways that these bivalves try to find a home is by using what looks like a giant tongue sticking out of their shells to crawl around. That tongue-like thing is actually called the “foot,” which is used to find a good place to settle down.
If these spat are tiny mussels, they will produce strong fibers made from protein that are called byssal threads. For those of you who have cooked mussels, you might know byssal threads as the beard-like thing that gets removed before you actually cook them. While these spat are too young for us to name, there are still some potential clues to their identity.
In this clip, it seems like we might be looking at a clam based on the shape of the shell, which is more rounded. Meanwhile, here the oblong shape of some of these shells suggests that we might be looking at mussels. But even if we don’t know exactly what these species are, there are still fascinating details that Evan pointed out to us.
Well, one of these details is unfortunate: most of these spat are dead, or dying, which is why you can see a lot of ciliates inside of them. But if you look towards the spat that’s a bit more left of center in the screen, you can see that this one is still alive, and that its shell is opening and closing. Along the edges of the shell are little bundles that look like hair.
Those are the spat’s tentacles, and their job is to act as a guard so that if something intrusive brushes along it, the bivalve knows to clamp the shell back down. And the ones at the top left and top center here appear to be alive, too. The translucency of their shells means that we can see movement of cilia along the gill filaments, which are those lines that look almost like a rib cage through the shell.
Most bivalves are filter feeders, and the movement of those cilia helps them capture food from the water that passes over their gills. And it’s really cool that we can see these things up close because it gives us a little hint of just how complicated the inner worlds of bivalves are. But the transparent shells of young bivalves don't last forever, and as bivalves develop, that inner world becomes harder to access.
Much of the early knowledge of how bivalve organs worked came from studies on young bivalves like ours and their transparent shells, or from studies on dissected bivalves or bivalves that had holes drilled into them. And while those techniques gave us important insights, they also weren’t necessarily able to give the full picture. A young bivalve’s organs may not have developed enough to reveal how it works.
An isolated organ is missing important context that might change the way it functions. And a bivalve that’s just undergone surgery might not provide the best example of how its organs perform. But what if there were a way to see into bivalves, to peer into the secrets they keep buried between their shells?
Well, that’s what we’re looking at here. These are the gills of the blue mussel Mytilus edulis. As we watch, water is passing over and through the gills, and yellow particles are getting trapped along the surface of the filaments.
As you can probably tell, this is not a typical Journey to the Microcosmos video. This is a J. Evan Ward production, a result of a technique that he and other scientists developed in 1991 using an endoscope to peer into bivalves.
Not all of the bivalves they tested this technique on were immediately open to the idea. In their paper, they described one particular clam species’ sensitivity to the endoscope, though they were able to make some observations. But other bivalves seemed to be more amenable, giving the scientists a whole new view of the creatures.
When we talked to him, Evan said that part of what made developing this technique so cool was that he could see things working in these creatures in a way no one had seen before, and it was so much more sophisticated than people had known. Videos like these helped scientists understand how bivalves pick and select particles to consume, and better understand more of the complex machinery in these sophisticated animals that otherwise seemed like simple creatures. So much of the way we understand the world around us comes in the choices we make in how we observe it.
Whether it’s changing the way you shine light from a microscope, or finding a way to get a camera into a shelled creature, there is always another way to see things— and always another way to be surprised by the complexity of nature. Thank you for coming on this journey with us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us. The folks on the screen right now are our Patreon patrons.
Every single name, is a person in the world who supports this channel, and we are so grateful to them that they have allowed us to go on this really remarkable and wonderful journey. Thanks, everybody for being a part of this. If you want to see more from our Master of Microscopes, James Weiss, you can check out Jam and Germs on Instagram.
And if you want to see more from us, just click on the channel name. We have a ton of other videos.
Sheltered and static, and perhaps sitting on your plate at a fancy restaurant. But before the mussel got to your plate, it led a life— and all things considered, a surprisingly active one.
Like the animals themselves, the word “bivalve” seems simple enough. These are mollusks made from a shell that is hinged in two parts, which are called valves. But the diversity of bivalves is vast, encompassing an array of animals like clams, mussels, scallops, and oysters that are found in all sorts of watery habitats.
Some have even been found in hydrothermal vents deep in the sea. Now luckily, because bivalves are so widespread, we didn’t have to travel as far as a deep sea hydrothermal vent to find one. These samples came to us from the Black Sea.
And when James, our master of microscopes, first saw them in his samples, they were just tiny black dots on seaweed. They were so small that he thought they were sand grains… until he noticed that one of those little black dots was moving! Putting those dots under the microscope and finding a tiny shelled creature was an exciting surprise.
But we here at Journey to the Microcosmos are not experts in the ways of bivalves. So we decided to reach out to someone who is an expert: J. Evan Ward, Professor and Head of the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Connecticut.
And one of the things Evan told us after we showed him our videos is that it is hard to tell exactly what bivalve species we are looking at because these are young bivalves, which are called spat. When bivalves reproduce, they produce larvae, which can then develop through different life strategies depending on the species. Some will become pests to fish, others just simply grow.
But eventually, they develop into spat. And Evan told us that most bivalve spat are pretty active because they have a very important goal in mind: they’re trying to find a place to settle down, so they have to move around to find a good home. So how long they remain a spat will depend on the conditions of the water around them.
And at the size ours seem to be, Evan estimated that if it were summer and they had plenty of food, they would likely grow out of this stage in just a few weeks and become juveniles. One of the ways that these bivalves try to find a home is by using what looks like a giant tongue sticking out of their shells to crawl around. That tongue-like thing is actually called the “foot,” which is used to find a good place to settle down.
If these spat are tiny mussels, they will produce strong fibers made from protein that are called byssal threads. For those of you who have cooked mussels, you might know byssal threads as the beard-like thing that gets removed before you actually cook them. While these spat are too young for us to name, there are still some potential clues to their identity.
In this clip, it seems like we might be looking at a clam based on the shape of the shell, which is more rounded. Meanwhile, here the oblong shape of some of these shells suggests that we might be looking at mussels. But even if we don’t know exactly what these species are, there are still fascinating details that Evan pointed out to us.
Well, one of these details is unfortunate: most of these spat are dead, or dying, which is why you can see a lot of ciliates inside of them. But if you look towards the spat that’s a bit more left of center in the screen, you can see that this one is still alive, and that its shell is opening and closing. Along the edges of the shell are little bundles that look like hair.
Those are the spat’s tentacles, and their job is to act as a guard so that if something intrusive brushes along it, the bivalve knows to clamp the shell back down. And the ones at the top left and top center here appear to be alive, too. The translucency of their shells means that we can see movement of cilia along the gill filaments, which are those lines that look almost like a rib cage through the shell.
Most bivalves are filter feeders, and the movement of those cilia helps them capture food from the water that passes over their gills. And it’s really cool that we can see these things up close because it gives us a little hint of just how complicated the inner worlds of bivalves are. But the transparent shells of young bivalves don't last forever, and as bivalves develop, that inner world becomes harder to access.
Much of the early knowledge of how bivalve organs worked came from studies on young bivalves like ours and their transparent shells, or from studies on dissected bivalves or bivalves that had holes drilled into them. And while those techniques gave us important insights, they also weren’t necessarily able to give the full picture. A young bivalve’s organs may not have developed enough to reveal how it works.
An isolated organ is missing important context that might change the way it functions. And a bivalve that’s just undergone surgery might not provide the best example of how its organs perform. But what if there were a way to see into bivalves, to peer into the secrets they keep buried between their shells?
Well, that’s what we’re looking at here. These are the gills of the blue mussel Mytilus edulis. As we watch, water is passing over and through the gills, and yellow particles are getting trapped along the surface of the filaments.
As you can probably tell, this is not a typical Journey to the Microcosmos video. This is a J. Evan Ward production, a result of a technique that he and other scientists developed in 1991 using an endoscope to peer into bivalves.
Not all of the bivalves they tested this technique on were immediately open to the idea. In their paper, they described one particular clam species’ sensitivity to the endoscope, though they were able to make some observations. But other bivalves seemed to be more amenable, giving the scientists a whole new view of the creatures.
When we talked to him, Evan said that part of what made developing this technique so cool was that he could see things working in these creatures in a way no one had seen before, and it was so much more sophisticated than people had known. Videos like these helped scientists understand how bivalves pick and select particles to consume, and better understand more of the complex machinery in these sophisticated animals that otherwise seemed like simple creatures. So much of the way we understand the world around us comes in the choices we make in how we observe it.
Whether it’s changing the way you shine light from a microscope, or finding a way to get a camera into a shelled creature, there is always another way to see things— and always another way to be surprised by the complexity of nature. Thank you for coming on this journey with us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us. The folks on the screen right now are our Patreon patrons.
Every single name, is a person in the world who supports this channel, and we are so grateful to them that they have allowed us to go on this really remarkable and wonderful journey. Thanks, everybody for being a part of this. If you want to see more from our Master of Microscopes, James Weiss, you can check out Jam and Germs on Instagram.
And if you want to see more from us, just click on the channel name. We have a ton of other videos.