Clams Eat Air, We Eat Clams
Used to be that plants were the only organisms that can turn air into food. No longer. Add clams to the list.
[S]cientists at Ocean Genome Legacy in Ipswich, Mass., and their colleagues at Harvard Medical School have shown that animals, too, can convert air into food…
The animals are marine clams called shipworms. They burrow into and eat wood, causing more than a billion dollars in damage to ships and piers each year.
“Wood has very little nutritional value,” said biologist Dan Distel, executive director of Ocean Genome Legacy. “It contains almost no protein. But these clams use bacterial symbionts living inside a special organ in their gills to convert dissolved air [which is about 80 percent nitrogen] into the protein they need.”
Before this discovery, Ipswich, Ma. — located just a few miles from where I grew up — was best known not for its air-eating clams but for its fried-clam eating visitors, who flock to stand in line for hours, to have their blood drained by giant mosquitoes, for the pleasure of paying more than $20 for a helping for fried bivalves at the eminent Clam Box. (I’m partial to the clams and view and cold on-tap beer at Farnham’s in nearby Essex.)
The Phantom Gourmet has the lowdown on where to get your fried clam on in Massachusetts here.
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