New Scientist
Image: lakshmioct01
With its colourful tentacles matched with fine silky threads, the flamboyant disco clam lives up to its name. And that’s before it shows off its party trick: it uses what has been likened to a foil-covered scarf to put on a mesmerising light show.
“When I show them to people who have never seen them before, they are initially surprised that these are actually clams,” says Lindsey Dougherty at the University of California in Berkeley, who has made the disco clam the subject of her PhD. “They’re very different from their mud-dwelling brethren.”
The disco clam lives on the reefs in the Indo-Pacific, using its silky byssal threads to cling to the rocky substrate. The party never stops: the clams perform their flashy light show more or less constantly, says Dougherty, but even so they can be difficult to find – not least because they rarely get much larger than about 7 centimetres. Read more on newscientist.com…
