Pectinidology (SCALLOPS) with Samantha Lynch

Oh hey, it's your waitress who just innocently upsolds you to the bucket of garlic fries. Ali Ward, I'm back with a fresh episode of Ologies. Scallops. You're asking scallops, I'm saying, but also I'm saying pec pectinodology, which is difficult to say. But I found it exactly one time in the literature. It was an online forum for fossil collectors. But it's a word, Okay, it comes from the Latin word pectin for comb or rake because of scallops, ridgie shells.

Samantha Lynch, she her, and I go by Sam. If you want to go into Sam that I answer to that just as easily as Samana.

Okay, good, we can get casual about scallops, Shelle.

Yes.

And now, from what I understand, you had dinner with doctor Bobby Corgan, who is an urban rodentologist. Is that correct?

Yes? It is.

Where did you meet him? I'm so jealous because I've never met him in person.

You never know who you're gonna have dinner with in New York City, and I ended up at a business dinner with a group of those folks. A couple of times I've met doctor Corgan over dinner on a couple of occasions, and I always have the pleasure of sitting next to him and we get to chat science for a little while.

Oh he's the best. He's the best. I honestly cried recording his episode just because talking about rats. I was like, I've never felt this way about rats before. He's so great. So she met doctor Bobby Corgan through her husband. And when did they meet?

I met him while I was working on my master's degree specializing in environmental toxicology. So at the time I was looking at the impacts of metal nanoparticles on oyster and sea urchin embryonic development.

So if you'd like a whole episode on sea urchins, we got it. It's linked to the show notes, alongside ones on corals and shells and snails and squids and fish. We got covered. Also linked some colonology episodes. Do you guys eat scallops? I got any?

You know what's so funny? That question has followed me throughout my entire career, and it's okay, No, It's one I always anticipate and the answer is no, okay, and then everybody goes, oh, no, should I not eat them, none of my business. I'm allergic to shrimp, and this is not based on anything scientific. I just then avoided a most all shellfish like creatures. I just avoid them all.

You're kind of a friend to them, I suppose.

Definitely one of their advocates.

So doctor Lynch is studying the health and well being of scallops and advocating for their populations. But studying some critters, whether it's bugs or bivalves, means really studying them, getting in there, and in this case also because some people eat them, and the research helps make sure people don'tate too many of them, or they don't eat them not safely.

Yeah, yes, so I am originally from South Florida, but when it was very young, made my way to Charlotte, North Carolina, then moved to New Jersey, and I'm back now in southern Florida.

Are there a lot of scallops in southern Florida?

No, there aren't any.

Okay, we do.

Actually, they'll have a nice population of base gallops on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and actually one of the I believe it's one of the only remaining recreational fisheries here in the United States.

Oh, I didn't know that there were scallop fisheries.

Yes, well, there used to be, actually quite abundantly, but that all ended around somewhere in the nineteen seventies. The populations just declined to the point that it was just not sustainable.

So in Florida there are regions where recreational divers can catch a few dozen scallops measured by the gallon with the shells, and these are the base gallops, a little other ones, and that all has to be done by hand. You got a snorkel, you got sunscreen, you got a boat. It's kind of like a seafaring easter egg hunt, really. But when it comes to the bigger ones, the sea scallops, though, boats from Massachusetts and New Jersey and Virginia as well

Yeah, I guess it kind of fell into its sideways a little bit like a lot of ten year old kids. I fell in love with dolphins, wanted to study dolphin behavior or whale songs like all those marine mammals, And after doing a little protting, I realized I needed to become a marine biologist in order to do some of those things that I wanted. But growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina doesn't put you in a very good place, at least geographically to study whale song.

Charlotte, North Carolina is about a three and a half hour drive from the beach, but the draw to dolphins is understandable. Just ask doctor Justin Greg of the recent two part Dolphinology episodes about dolphins. I'll link them in the show notes. But yes, with that long a journey to the beach, Sam took a detour into an undergrad position studying honeybees, which provided kind of the animal behavior

It was just so cool to just be standing outside and to watch a honeybee sworn just take off, suddenly take off in mass and fly out to their new nest site, and just they're flying all around you. The sound was so loud, the buzzing of their wings, and it was just so cool to sit there and go, how this has nothing to do with me, but I get to see it. You know, they don't care that I'm standing here. They definitely paid us no mind whatsoever.

Are to them at all? Yes?

Yes?

Oh no?

Yeah. So I realized after a couple of run ins with them, unfortunate run ins, that I do I swell. I have a lot of localized swelling wherever they may sting me. And if I wanted to see out of both my eyes for the rest of my life, honey bees and I should probably go our separate ways.

Go waggle dance that direction verally. Well, yes, and so how did you end up dipping back into the water. Yeah.

So then I participated in that lab as an undergraduate student, but at the same time I was doing the honeybee research, I was also working just as a student lab tech in an oyster research lab. They're on campus, and I really didn't get to interact with the oysters or a lot of the science at all. I was just mostly preparing gels for gel electrophoresis and kind of doing a little bit of like grunt undergrad lab work.

So she was approached by a faculty member who was like, heyes, you want to work with some oysters over here.

And so I thought, wow, well, this now can check off my other box and get me back into the water and they don't sting.

Me safe from tiny little animals that stapped her with their butts. Sam indeed got aquatic at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she did her master's thesis Comparative developmental sensitivities of sea urchin and oyster embryos and larvae to metal nanoparticles, because.

I wanted to ask questions regarding the impacts of utrification. Sure, sorry, what so? Utification is basically like the nutrient loading of a bay or a coastal water body to the point that you see some really measurable, observable impacts such as algal blooms, you kind of micro algal blooms, macro algal blooms, fish kills as a result of those algal blooms. And then what I really wanted to hone in on was seagrass bed die offs as a result of those algal blooms by way of utrification.

And so that's when things get out of balance, and this kind of delicate balance and the ecosystem gets thrown off and then you see big dieoffs in certain parts.

Yes, yes, exactly. So you have these submerged aquatic vegetation. These seagrass beds that in a healthy estuary will oftentimes you know, cover a very large area. These seagrass beds are critical habitat. They provide a refuge from predation for multitudes of different species in what would otherwise be almost a barren landscape, you know, just bare bottom sand mixed with a little muck and mud, place for say a small fish to hide or a base gallop to hide.

So in the big chain of things, these giant algal blooms keep things shady. So shady sea grass is like you have killed our food are light, And these sea grasses said goodbye to Earth and they go to heaven. And then the critters down in the sea have nowhere to live, and then they get gobbled up so it's like, thanks Algae, you're having such a good time. You ruin thinks for everyone, and now great, Okay, we got to hold the phone here because you're like, there's no place

Well, I'm going to kind of talk here specifically about bass scallops and base gallops are bivalves, so they're in the same class as your oysters and your muscles and your clayoms. But as you mentioned, they are mobile. They're kind of like the charismatic species of bivalves. They look at you with those little blue eyes and they're pretty. They're pretty darn cute.

Cute and fast.

They are totally mobile as adults, So as you mentioned oysters, they submit themselves down and so they don't really care about the seagrass bed. They form their own reefs and they're not, you know, an oysters not hiding. It just closes up a shell real tight and hopes that somebody doesn't come along and you shuck it off the clump. Oh, and your muscles they're attaching using those little hairy bistle threads. Your clams are mobile, but they're usually just kind of

Oh do they do that when they were tiny little babies.

Yeah, actually when they're a little bit bigger than tiny little babies. So bass scallops they start out their life in the water column as free swimming pelagic larvae. So okay, kind of floating around there in the water column. And actually, can we talk about how base gallops reproduce because that's kind of wild.

Yes, We're definitely going to get to scallop fucking because people have questions. Yes, let me tell you so, Yes, put a pin in that, because for sure I'm still like, what's the difference between a base scallop and a sea scallop? But we're also going to get to.

That, okay.

So first off, there are over three hundred species of scallop. Did you know that? Neither did I? But only one of them is argo pectin Iridians, the base scallop. Again, base scallops, they're much smaller if you've eaten them. They're like kind of like the size of a macadamia nut, depending on how poorly you cook them. So in my case they get small, I do it wrong. But they live in shallow coastal waters and they have a shorter

Yeah okay, yeah, so they're swimming little tiny baby larvae they're actually called and this is true for oysters as well, and a lot of your bivalves. They call them d like das and dog villager larvae.

So a villager is a planktonic larva and it means sale bearing. And if you are desperate to know how different groups of the same species have regional wiggles, you can see the nineteen ninety six paper villagers from different populations of sea scallop have different vertical migration patterns.

They look like a capital d oh okay, or you can call it like a straight hinge larvae, and they have shells. They have shells by forty eight hours after fertilization.

Oh my god, so fast. Yeah.

So they have these little shells and they have like a little vlum that sticks out with celia on it, and that allows them to swim and eat and explore the water column and try not to get eaten. So they're they're kind of getting moved along mostly by water currents, but they do have a little bit of control of their vertical orientation, so they can swim up or swim down or sink down really fast.

Do they have an elevator or something?

And they do this by moving in like a clockwise helix, So this a little like spiral as they're going up and down in the water column and they do that for about two weeks until finally, hopefully they land in a patch of sea grass, and then they receive different environmental cues that say, hey, this is a good spot, settle down here, and they go through a settlement process where then they become juveniles. They've grown, they're a little

They're able to shuffle up to safety when they're young, so they don't get snacked upon by snails or crabs below the grass.

They don't want to go too high because goals could come down and eat them, so they orient themselves kind of in the middle, and they use bissele threads to hold on to those seagrass blades.

And so do they do that until they have a bigger shell, Do they shed their shell or do they just keep building on top of it?

They just keep building. They just keep growing, and they stay on those blades as long as they can, until eventually they just get too heavy for their little bissele threads to hold them up, and then they fall down to the bottom.

And then are they kind of swimming in the mud?

Like?

Where do they spend most of their time under the sand? Are they popping up every couple of days or every couple of minutes?

So no, they're usually right on the surface, so they don't bear it. They don't dig or bury down in. You'll find them just right there on like the benthic surface.

Just a side note, I didn't know what ben think meant either, and I looked it up. So it means something at the bottom of a body of water, and it comes from the Greek for the deep of the sea. And I was like, oh, that's a cool word. It turns out it was coined by the same guy who made up the word ecology. This guy's full of hits. Who was he? He was a German nature lover and a zoologist and a doctor, a marine biologist, as well as a great artist. Wait, I have one of his books.

And most of the time they've got their shells open, filtering water, trying to get as much as they can to eat until something comes along that would cause them to swim away on the blody.

What are they eating, especially if they need to be making a shell out of calcium, like what is their diet like algae?

So they're filtering the water for different algal species that are present.

All that calcium from tiny bites of algae. Yep, according to research like microalgae for human and animal nutrition, tiny alogy can pack a ton of minerals including potassium and iron and magnesium and calcium and for more on this. You can see the biomeneralogy episode. So the point is, there aren't any kids scallops out there like fiending for a glass of milk for their bones. But how big

Yes, so you can eat both based gallop and sea scallops. Bas gallops can be sometimes I think a little bit harder to obtain. If you are eating based gallops, they likely came from China. China actually has the largest aquaculture fishery for bas gallops. We don't here in the United States. So if you're eating a base gallop, it most likely came from China. And when you're eating a base gallop, you're not eating the entire scalop. You're that little like

And that's the thing that keeps them slammed shut when they need to protect themselves. Yes, what about the rest of the scallop, because we eat the whole frickin' muscle and oyster, what do they do with the rest of it?

Right, with an oyster, you just you eat the whole thing. I think maybe it's a European thing to eat more of the scallop. I've heard it referred to as like the coral, and what that is is just its gonads. So the rest of the scallop is kind of just some peripheral parts and then that big orange spot, the big orange tissue is their gonnadom material.

Oh interesting. If you're like scallops are orange inside, you can count yourself among the many individuals who have never seen a scallops junk. So picture a tiny crescent shaped little pillow, kind of like the one that you'd sling around your neck for a red eye flight. The male variety his creamy white, and the female or the egg bearing gonad, ranges from pinkish to bright orange thanks to a carotenoid pigment called xioxanthon, which also makes gojiberries and

Yeah, yeah, So when you open one up, the first thing that is going to catch your eye is probably that at ductor muscle, because it's it's pretty large, relatively large, and when you've opened it up, you've had to kind of saw through it so you know where it is. And then you'll also notice that orange, that bright orange tissue. And as I mentioned, that's their their gonnadal material, So that's where they're making their sperm and their egg cells.

Yep, them's their crotch and in some parts of the world, particularly Japan, people eat the row too, and the mantle or the skirt, which is kind of the stretchy tissue at the edge of the shell.

They have like a little stomach, and that also leads into tissue called the hepata pancreas oh okay, sounds fancy, yeah, and that functions as a little bit of like a liver. It's it's not a liver, but it's kind of analogous to a liver. For scallops. Oysters have them too, and so there's a lot of like detoxification occurring in their hepatapancreas well.

They're filtering so much. You've got a figure they need a pretty good cleaning organ, right.

Yes, yes, exactly, And actually we use that organ quite a bit when assessing like the physiological health of the scallop. So shellfish are just really great sentinel species. So when you're monitoring the health of an ecosystem, it's really helpful to have kind of go to species that you can

And according to the twenty twenty paper antioxidant defenses of flame scallop exposed to the water soluble fraction of U used vehicle crank case oils, some antioxidants were found in wonky concentrations in the digestive glands. There were decreases of antioxidants in other parts of the body. Just trying to cope with this stuff. Now, some of you, I hear you. You're so mad right now, You're so mad because the crimson face fingered flame scallop isn't a true scallop, and

So all that's kind of going on in there.

Do they have a mouth?

Do they have a mouth? So not a mouth as in you and I have a mouth. So they have along the outer edge they have their gills, which is going to help with gas exchange, and along that same area they've got cilia that are bringing in and funneling in the water and doing a little particle extraction and concentrating those particles down to get into the gut.

And they also have tentacles around the ridge that look like a mustache made of fingers. Sometimes these things are so long and feathery that we have no idea because we just see their shell bones wash up on the beach, or we're just eating its one big muscle, but irl, some of them look like they have teeth made of

So they definitely have a size preference. And there has been some really extensive work done on maybe not so much what base gallops eat, but definitely what oysters eat because they're just such a huge aquaculture organism. I guess species use so frequently in aquaculture that everybody wants to know, you know, what's the optimal food to feed these guys so that we can get the best oysters we can out of it. There's a lot of work on that, and I think a lot of times it falls down

May I offer you a gander at the paper Food of the Oyster, which notes that eighty eight percent of the oyster's food supply is composed of diatomes. But they also eat kind of slim margins of spores, they have some particles of seaweed, they need some small animals. But recent studies echo that diatomes are just a big yum yum for them, and that some oysters can filter up to fifty gallons of water a day just digesting what they like and just booting the rest out their poop shoot.

And I think with aquaculture where that kind industry kind of got a rough start, but they are figuring out sustainable practices. There's a lot of the most exciting work in that space for me is around integrated farming or vertical ocean farming, or called three D ocean farming, and it's about growing oysters and muscles and clams and all these different kinds of algae together in a simplified ecosystem that kind of creates habitat for other things to swim

Okay, but what about fashion? Now? Scallops have shells that are very distinct, right, Little Mermaid is coming out with a new version. I always wonder do people who study bivalves do they ever say like, you're not going to find scallop shells of that nature this deep in the ocean. Do you ever notice like mermaid bras and say like that, I don't come into that size.

Actually, I mean I think some of these well I don't know what size a Little Mermaid, I don't know what her bra size is, but some of your sea scallops can get to be a little bit larger, but definitely not a base scallop. That might might prevent a little like nip slip. That's about as far as those little base scallops are gonna do.

And if you ever hear the term divers scallop, that's just a sea scallop, but it's hand harvested by divers in scuba gear rather than by rawling the seabed floor to gather them all up. So the diver's gallops they tend to be bigger, they tend to be harvested better, and these diverse gallop shells can be up to nine inches in diameter, just in case you're in the market for a bra. And why is Ariel from The Little

No? No, So They're an estering species, which means that you find them in somewhat brackish water, so lower salinities than ocean water, not full strength, but definitely not fresh. Somewhere there in the middle where you have rivers mixing with oceans kind of coming together and swarming that mix, and these bay gallops as well as their other estering neighbors, they've had to adapt to what is essentially a constantly

Oh, that makes sense. They're left high and dry pretty much.

Yep.

I also imagine that brackish water where there's a lot of freshwater coming out of river sources and things, that's got to be a lot of concentrated pollutants or am I making that up?

No? No, you're definitely not. We do see a lot of either contaminants like metal contamination or your PCBs or your PAHs.

So those stand for polychlorinated by females, which are human made chemicals that were banned from manufacturer in nineteen seventy nine, but there's just still leaking from a bunch of stuff. And if fish eat fish who have eaten pcbes, then you're eating pcbes if you eat that fish. Now, Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons PAHs, those occur naturally. They're in things like coal and crude oil, and some can contribute to cancer.

Like all those kind of nasty things coming into your coastal water bodies. The other thing that these coastal water bodies have to face, and I kind of touched on it before with the utrification. You know, oftentimes these bump right up to golf courses and people's backyards, a lot of places where fertilizer is used extensively. And that's just like prime algae food. I love it.

Oh So, then does that feed algae that can block the sunlight for that seagrass.

Yes, yes, exactly, or it can feed algae that produced toxins that can result in fish kills and even shellfish kills. One of the reasons why we have such a declining base gall population was from some really really big brown and red tides that came through in the seventies and just kind of really wiped out the North Carolina populations. The New Jersey populations were hit hard by that as well.

So I went back to the annals of the Disco era, and sure enough, so many studies on this, such as the nineteen seventy five paper in the Journal of Environmental Letters titled Effects of the nineteen seventy one Spring Summer red tide upon mid Eastern Gulf of Mexico patch reef communities, which mentions that under the appropriate environmental conditions, red tides may result in near complete extirpations of shallow water reef biotas and can significantly alter the flora and fauna there

Each New tonight at six what appears to be a jubilee on the eastern shore.

Look at this.

Jubilees occur when oxygen levels drop, driving fish and other sea life to the surface, making for an easy catch.

Some people are like, sign me up, these things are still alive and about to go anyway. Other people not so much.

I don't know if i'd want to eat those, if they've been filtering these toxic algal species, I'd be a little, I don't.

Know, hesitant. Yeah, well, you would also need an EpiPen. You would need like five EpiPens also, so you're good, you're like, oh, thank you, I'm not into it. Go for it, have at it. And yes, I looked into this. And while there may be thousands of flounder and white trout and crabs and shrimp at the water's edge about to expire in more ways than one, you don't want

Silly come from a couple different sources. One of it is we actually just manufacture metal nanoparticles. Titanium dioxide is in a lot of your sunscreens directly relevant to our critters that live in the water, because you put it on hop in the ocean or the bay and there it goes right in the water directly.

Are the titanium dioxides the ones that are reef safe or no?

You know what? It's kind of like out for debate still some of that stuff came out, as things do, came out, perhaps a little faster than the ecological research to keep up. An interesting thing about like the titanium dioxide nanoparticles is that they look one way when they're manufactured, but when they're exposed to UV light like sunlight, they change,

I looked into this and the answer is kind of a defeated just a whimpering sigh. So titanium oxide. There was a twenty fourteen study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, and it was titled sunscreens as a source of Hydrogen peroxide production in Coastal waters, which found that the inorganic oxide nanoparticle content in one gram of commercial sunscreen was enough to increase hydrogen peroxide and water and it directly affects the growth of vital plankton and thus

I looked at silver nanoparticles. That's another one that we manufacture in large amounts because it's kind of like an anti microbial property. So like your antimicrobial clothes or antimicrobial coatings, those a lot of times are coated with a silver nanoparticle complex. And that's all finding good until you wash your clothes up in the water system, and then by way of water runoffs, it enters our coastal ecosystems.

So yeah. For more in this see Silver Recovery from laundry washwater Roll of Detergent Chemistry, which was a twenty eighteen Dartmuth study published in the Journal of American Chemical Society, which concluded these silver nanoparticles can be toxic to many aquatic organisms and can impact the effectiveness of bacterial processing in wastewater treatment plants. So, hey, be stinky, just be stinky.

Up there Yeah, Well, so you can see evidence of them in oyster tissue. They kind of ingest them, and then sometimes they get kind of stuck within the oyster.

Lipid peroxidation side note is when a free radical, which is a particle with an unpaired electron, grabs an electron from a nearby fat and it degrades the cell, which creates something called lipid peroxides, which can cause mutations that affect the ability of an organism to survive naturally. And scallops aren't having a boom time, but Sam says that's largely because of a habitat decline when red tides decades ago knocked out a lot of the sea grass, and

And from then on, these populations have just really struggled to regrow themselves. They just cannot get together and make enough make enough babies to get the population back up. So they kind of follow a little bit of like a boom and bust population dynamic growth dynamic there, and so we're we're in the bust phase and they just can't quite get enough going to increase their population numbers in any significant manner. And so some places have some

So pecronologists are essentially just throwing scallop orgies and crossing their fingers that these bivalves get a leg up even though they do not have legs. Okay, how are they mating? Are they seeing each other from across a bay and being like, I've noticed your fifty thousand eyes, which I'm going to ask you about later, But how are they getting together?

Yeah? So scallop sex is always fun. It's an interesting one. So probably the coolest thing about base scallops are they are simultaneous hermaphrodites.

Oh love. Yeah, so they.

Are both male and female at the same time, which is not something you see often. Hermaphrodites are common in the bivalve world, but usually at different times. It'll be separated on a temporal scale, so they'll either start out as male and then in a couple of years turn female or vice versa. Base scallops they do it all at the same time time efficient. Yes, and they are broadcast spawners.

I'm horny and this water now has my reproductive cells in it in case anyone wants.

Them so, which means they release their eggs and their sperm into the water column and hope that they intermingle and fertilization occurs.

And so they just hope for the best. So is it a competition of like who can put out more game meats.

You want to put out as many gamuts as you can, and you want your neighbors to put out as many gam meats as you can as well, because you don't really want self fertilization. I mean, not that the scallop wants anything, but yeah, anthropomorphizing here a little bit. But they they do have really high reproductive output. An individual scallop can make and release over five million eggs in one effort and one go and this is important because

Maybe, Oh I didn't know that.

Yeah, and they usually only reproduce once, just one.

Go at it. So is that one reason why they're having a tough rebound?

Yes, exactly. It definitely contributes, and so they get one shot. The thing about broadcast spawning, and this is again a really common way to go about it in the shellfish world. Oysters and muscles, they're broadcast spawners as well. But in oyster, you know, they have attached to a reef, so they're with all their friends. So when they spawn, their neighbors spawn at the same time, and they're all there together. But base gallops a little less lucky because they're mobile,

If anybody out there.

And then they eggs are fertilized by sperm and cleavage c your division happens very quickly, and by forty eight hours you have a shelled de villager swim larvaeh just.

Out in the world and hoping for the best. Right, You're like, find that blade of sea grass, stay away from seagulls, watch out for snails. You got the right. And their eyes, their eyes, their eyes, their eyes, their eyes. I have a thousand questions about eyes because they seem to have a thousand eyes. What are the eyes? What are they looking for? How many do they have? What's going on?

Yeah? So the base gallops beautiful blue eyes are just amazing and a little creepy when they're looking at you know, but they're very cool. Their eye spots are. An interesting kind of factoid about them is that they use mirrors instead of a lens. Wow, I do know that we use a lens in our eye. But base gallops I think are the only organism that we know of that use that mirror. It's a protein mirror in the back.

Ye do are there other bivalves that even have eyes or eye spots?

Yeah, so most of your bivalves do have eye spots, but they are capable of kind of detecting the presence or the absence of light. So they have these photoreceptors and so they can respond sometimes to some light cues, and that can be especially helpful when you're in that

An oyster doesn't need to know if a predator approaches because it's glued to a rock. What's it going to do? But is that why scallops have so many eyes because those eyes are stuck along the rim of the shell. I guess they have a shell, so they can't really move them around on stocks, right.

Oh, they are on they are a little bit on stocks. Yes, they can move them around a little bit. And then they're also accompanied by other structures that are movable that can detect chemical cues in the water. And they're able to wiggle these around a little bit to get a more precise understanding of their environment.

And do they have a brain to process that or what's the closest thing to a brain? Escallop has, so.

They kind of have this ganglia that wraps around the adductor, so they're able to process these cues that are coming in. But it's not like a cephala pod brain.

Is it a little bit simpler?

Yes?

Oh yes? Can I ask you questions from listeners? Yeah? Oh, they've got good ones. Sam also says that community science has helped her research so much, and that she has worked really closely with a volunteer group in Barnegut Bay and they're called Reclam the Bay, So hello to all

No purpose that I'm aware of. I think it is just a phenotypic characteristic of base scallops by other scallop species as well, But no advantageous or deleterious adaptation that I'm aware of.

Ahh okay, good to know.

So.

Of course, folks have argued and debated over the years what role shell shapes play, and there was a twenty fifteen paper titled anti Predator Adaptations in a Great Scallop a Paleontological Perspective, which put forth the theory that this shell structure of the scallop improves the mechanical strength and it allows them to swim away from any mollusk crunching predators.

Flap flap? That's cute, thank you. They are the most mobile of the bivalves, for sure. They're the old swimming by valves and they do this through jet propulsion, so not totally unique to the animal world. But they draw in water. They use that really strong adductor muscle there to plamp down that shell and it pushes the water basically out their back end and uses jet propulsion to move forward.

And by their back end, do you mean their butt or do you just mean the back end of the.

Back end of the shell?

Okay, I'm like, that's so much water to take in. I'm like, are they getting calonics like daily? Okay, good to know, so just out the back end of the shells. A ton of people, including for some question askers Marine Putts and Laser Interligator, as well as Katie Hopeman and Tina Hwang asked, in Laser's words, is it true that scallops can't close their shell completely? Can they clam up essentially? Can they shut it all the way so they can.

Shut it fairly tight? But it is true that they are not as water tight as an oyster. Okay, but they can fairly well if they don't want you to open them. It's not like you can wed your finger in when they're closed. They got a strong muscle and they're closed. But for example, oysters can be exposed to air for a relatively long time. You can leave an oyster out in air for a day or more and it will be a little stressed after a while, but

Is that because of their smaller adductor muscle or no, just the way that their shell is.

I think it's just the way that their shell is. Their aductor muscle isn't necessarily smaller, They're just smaller proportionally.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. This next question was asked by Becky the sassy seagrass scientist, who I'm thinking is going to love this episode and Connor as well as in Sam Burnett's words, how contaminated are scallops with microplastic, pesticides, heavy metals, et cetera. Are they safe to eat or should consumers avoid them? And Lee Horton says, how are they doing? Cool to eat them? Please say yes, but it's okay if you say no.

No. I think they're definitely cool to eat as long as you're getting them from a reputable source. Scallops and oysters and your edible bivalves, when they are being marketed for human consumption, they are coming from very carefully regulated and monitored water, and hopefully they're also coming from sustainable sources, sustainable aquaculture, so I think they're safe. I would just pay attention to where you're getting them from, and if you trust the source, then they're fine.

Good advice from an expert on this, which is good. Are most of the ones that people eat? Are they mostly farmed?

Yeah, base scallops are. Yes. Like I said, they're all coming from China, and they've got a really robust aquaculture system. They grow them in these like lantern nets, so they're in these nets suspended right up off the bottom of the water, and they're able to pull them in with minimal destruction to the environment.

Okay, so that's the base gallops, which aren't harvested much in the wild unless you're out with a snorkel in Florida scooping up a few in a bucket when they're in season, although there are a few hatcheries in New England that are breeding managed populations after this big dip from pollution and algal blooms. Now, what about the bigger scallops, the sea scallops, your sea scallops.

However, I think those are largely still harvested via dredge, so not so sustainable definitely carries with that a lot more destruction to the local environment there. So again I would just think carefully about the sources and if they're using sustainable fishery practices.

That's good to know. Heather Horton Wheden wanted to know, said, back when I ate mea many years ago, I had a scallop and there was a small crunchy bit in it and that was it. I was doll with scallops and all meat for that matter, no regurgitations. If you eat a scallop in the crunchy, is that a baby or is that just part of the shell.

That's probably just part of the shell. It's definitely not a baby, Okay, it's probably just part of the shell.

Given that the babies are out there as larvae and they take forty eight hours out in the ocean, there's never any baby scallops inside a scallop.

Yes, yes, very true. Yeah, but other organisms might eat the babies, true, true, true, but the babies are never going to be large enough that they're gonna crunch Okay.

Good to know, Good to know. Scott Hanley and Ashley say er Da Rivas wanted to know a little bit about the dry pack versus wet pack debate or explanation, or about frozen Do you have any idea what that's about.

I think it's a culinary thing and I don't know much except for usually when you buy these things, you're paying by the weight, So I would imagine if it's wet packed, you're paying for some extra water. Yeah, it might not be the most cost effective way, but I don't know if who tastes better or who's safer.

Yeah, I'll look into some culinary aspects of it. So I called in a favor from the Miles Thompson, which if you're in the know about big deal chefs, you might recognize the name of this James Beard nominated chef. So he came up in the Lle kitchens of Son of a Gun and Nobu and Animal. He had his own restaurant. Now you met, and he is the most accomplished yet humble person I have ever encountered in my life. This man is a boss. So he's been busy launching

Scallops are fascinating creatures, fun to work with, and even more fun to cook. So when we talk about scallops, there's essentially three types that we can talk about. There are base scallops, or are the small kind of baby sized scallops, and then diver scallops, which are the larger scalps in the shells. And then there's also frozen scallops.

So he's talking about sodium tripolyphosphate or STPP for short. Sometimes it goes by a pen name on food labels as E four fifty one, and it's used to bulk up and increase the weight of seafoods. It's also used in leather tanning and flame retardants. So it's understandable why Miles is not into that shit and he prefers the freshest seafood possible.

I would say probably my favorite type of scalp to work with is a live scalop, either a bay's scallop or a diver's scallop. And when you're buying these, if you can find them in a store or from a fish monger. It is very important to find out where they're coming from. Ideally you'll be getting wild scalops so that they'll have the most flavor, and honestly, wild scalps will have the least impact, hopefully on the ecosystem if you're getting it from people that have responsible picking practices.

Guy that's the adductor muscle, by.

Putting your thumb between the small side muscle of the scalop and the skirt and running your finger around the scalp to remove the scalop from everything else. Then you can pull off that small, little chewy muscle. I don't really use that unless I'm making an exo sauce or something, but that's a little more in depth kind of thing to talk about then. For right now, then what you can do is snip off the black digestive track an

That is actually the adductor muscle of the scallop, which before this episode you just called the scallop because we all did. Everyone does that meaty little puck. But let's start with the little ones, the base scallops, macadamia nuts.

What you'll need is a cast iron fan, neutral oil, find kosher or fine sea salt, and a tray lined with a piece of paper towel. After they're cleaned and rinsed to remove the grit, you want to dry them with a paper towel and lay them on a plate to temper so they're closer to room temperature, so that when you cook them they don't seize up so much, a little more relaxed. They get a nice seer, but they don't get so rubbery and tough. Then you'll seize them well, and by well, I mean salt them with

Mile says that unlike the smaller bay scallops, the sea scallops are diverse scallops. You want to see on the flat side, not along any round edges, maybe two minutes, but really use your eyes before you flip them.

This one will go a little longer because it's a bit of a bigger piece of protein. But once you see that brown line creeping up on the side of the scalop, you should at this point have a beautiful seal on the scalp. If you're using cast iron and have a thick enough screen of oil, well it will basically look like a seared hamburger. Crazy. So take the scallop out, flip it onto a small tray like a fajita size tray, and all the scalps you've see it, flip them onto that tray and let them raster for

You can find out more about him on Instagram at Miles Cooks. His food is art and his new restaurant again is Baby Bistro. With underscores after Baby and bestro in case you want to check it out. Also, the samlier and wine pairing's top notch. Again, I'm very excited about going this week. Just a quick question, how did I get a literally world famous chef who's pretty much like the guy from the Bear to send me a

Well.

He co officiated with Dylan Rodriguez from the recent Field Trip WGA Strike episode a few weeks ago. So we are very lucky to have such good friends, we know. Also, first time question asker Judy Lawler said that the large scallops I've been told are actually eel any truth to this, and then another patron Judy Judith Wessell said, my dad insisted that the tiny base scallops were the only ones worth eating, and that the larger ocean scallops were really

Yes, so scallopsies. That means that the population is open to harvesting. So it's not necessarily a season for them, it's a season for us. It's where, Okay, the fishery sciences have decided at this point in time it's safe to harvest a certain number over a certain period of time. They don't really migrate, so it's not like the scallops came into the bay at this particular time, and you're allowed to fish for them. They are there year round.

Oh wow, but I'm.

Hesitant to call that a migration.

It's more just dispersal, and just for funzies, those teeny tiny babies in the water are called spat and etymologists think that that word came from just the past tense to spit in the water. It's a disrespectful name for babies. But a few folks, including Lee, Horton and Connor, want to know about their habitat range. If you needed a scallop friend, where could you find one? Are scalops found around the world.

They are found around the world, but not all around the world. Bay scallops are largely found or historically found along the east coast of North America. But as I mentioned before, they are now in China, and that's because we brought them to China.

Are they farming base gallops that are native to North America? Yes, oh wow, But I'm sure they just do. Maybe they're doing business differently over there or something.

Yes, China has put in a vast amount of resources into aquaculture, more so than we have, just in terms of development of different aquaculture practices. But yes, they have argopectin Iranians. So that's the base gallop. It wasn't an accidental invasion. It was introduced to China purposely, and in the eighties, I believe. I think that went over in the nineteen eighties.

Would you say that you have found, like Slayer would like to know, do they have personalities? Slayer asked, do scallops have families and feelings and stuff like that.

Well, they don't have families because they're broadcast spawners, so they never know what happens to their eggs and their sperm. What comes of that. Do they have feelings? I don't know. I've never spoken to a scallop and had one answer, me, Okay, so I don't want to discredit something that we have no way of evaluating scientifically. They are really funny little like I said, they're kind of the charismatic bivalve. I like you.

A few people had word questions. Nick A specsowl and first time cross jasker Julia Shepherd. Jillian wants to know what's the actual correct way to pronounce scallops. Some say scallops, some say scallops? What is it? You've lived in Florida, you've lived in North Carolina, you've lived in Jersey. How do you say scallops?

Scallops?

There you go? There it is? Who's saying it scallops?

I don't know. I've never heard that in my life.

So in a nineteen eighty one article by the publication Yankee, they trying to settle this score. But it was published again on New England or dot com in twenty twenty two because apparently this controversy has a longer lifespan than even a sea scallop and a lot of humans. So in it, the writer Catherine A. Powers quotes an ancient friend of hers. She says, who declares beware the person who says scallop, they don't know what they're talking about.

I don't think so, you know what, I take that back, but I don't know what it's from. My master's advisor used to use this little esop cartoon and they had like bows on their head. They might have been like babies. But I don't know where she got that from.

I don't know where she got that from either. So I looked, y'all, I looked for hours. I googled scallops baby cartoon by Valve Bows. I went on research Gate and I found Sam's master's thesis. I tracked on the co authors and I found her advisor, doctor Amy Ringwood. Then I watched several YouTube videos of doctor Ringwood interviewed in her lab to see if there was an errant poster or like a faded inkjet print out tacked the

They should be a scallop movie. They should just make.

There should with that many eyes and those ridges and the way they hop around, are you kidding me? It's time. The way that their mouth can go blah blah blah blah blah and look like a talking puppet, like Hello, get in touch with Samantha Lynch something.

Though.

They're so cute, but something's gonna suck. What's the worst thing about scallops? What do you hate about them? Or the job?

Yeah? Well, they can cut opening scallops. Their shells can be sharp if you get it in just the right way, or if there's a little slippery and you're trying to get it open, and you kind of get yourself with the scalpel instead slipper the little suckers. I do have a couple of little scars on my hands from I guess poor shucking.

For you should wear gloves for those who do partake. Do you have any good shucking? Got any good shuck and advice?

Yeah, just wear gloves and wear wore. Gloves are helpful and a sharp knife, but definitely the gloves because their shells do harbor a lot of bacteria, just like oysters. And if you do get cut, you want to make sure you clean out the cut very well. Nobody wants fabrio.

I don't want fibrio and I don't even know what it is. Oh, look, it's an infection, Okay. So the Center for Disease Control says that in the US this seawater bacteria causes eighty thousand illnesses per year. And there are many different strains of Vibrio and several can cause food borne illnesses. But another superstar in the Vibrio genus

Yeah, you want to kind of go in close to the hinge, so where the shell meets the shell, and the goal is to get in and slice that aductor muscle because that's what's holding that shell close. So once you slice through that muscle, then it just falls open.

Okay, what about your favorite thing about them?

So it's kind of twofold, because I think scallops are really fascinating creatures in that they have their mobility and they have their eyesight, and they're able to use those two things together and maneuver through the seagrass beds, and I think that's fantastic. But the other thing that I think is really fantastic are the seagrass beds. I love their home. I really enjoy working in these coastal water bodies that you can access with a kayak. You don't

Does a lot of your work involve kind of like solitary kayak field work out out on the walls.

It can, it's not necessarily solitary, like you'll have another member of the lab or an undergraduate with you to help. But a lot of a lot of my dissertation work really was just me out in the field trying to do what I needed to do, and then actually, because research is research, A lot of my field work actually did not go as planned, and I had a large part of one of my experiments I think stolen.

Yeah no, yeah, what happened.

Well, it was there one day and gone the next, and I suspect that local crab fisher people had taken them thinking that they were crab traps, and I was encroaching on their turf even though I wasn't pitching their crabs. So as a grad student, like, that's just devastating because that's like the whole year just like, oh no, but that kind of removed that so solitary kayak and the picture.

Ah, what was that like that day that you discovered that?

It was heartbreaking. It was really heartbreaking and panic inducing and just all sorts of anxiety. But thankfully I had two really great advisors for my PhD dissertation, and they helped me very quickly pivot, get my feet back underneath me and moving forward. So it was okay, It all worked out okay in the end, but that was a really rough day.

How many times in your life have you been through something terrible but you've been like, well, it's not as bad as a day I realized my research was stolen by crab fishermen.

Oh, that should be like an inspirational poster.

Right, It's not as bad as having someone who thinks you're trying to steal their crab steal your scallops. Did you learn anything about resilience through that at all? I mean there are bus times and there were boom times. Did you have to apply anything ecological to it?

Yeah? It ended up being a bit of a blessing because it required me to expand my professional network a little bit. I needed to get more scallops from other sources. And the more people you know and the more people you have connections with only helps you. So it did it. It helped me to expand that network. But at the time it was it was hard.

It is amazing how much community really factors into science. So much of being able to ask someone a question that informs your research, or someone's looking for a lab and you happen to know someone like I think that it's understated so much in a lot of academia and just life. How much helping other people out is really just part of the ecosystem of doing anything in life.

Well, you know, I couldn't agree more, and just speaking from my experience in coastal ecology, research, which is perhaps compared to some other avenues of science, can be underfunded, and so you really end up relying on each other. You know, it can cost a lot of money to get a boat out on the water, and I've found

And then of course here we are talking because of Bobby Corgan, so it's great help. I'm so glad I got to ask you all of this. I don't know if I'm going to eat scallops in the future. I love them, but I love them differently now so we'll see. But it's good to know that one can look for sustainable fisheries and can just marvel at them for the creatures that they are. Yes, thank you so so much for doing this. This is a joy.

See this is so fun, like so much fun. My first podcast. It's like a great one. I love it.

So ask generous people shellfish questions because look at how much you can learn. And doctor Samantha Gilbert Lynch is on Instagram. Her handle is linked in the show notes, as is this week's charity, Reclam the Bay. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both And if you have kids or you know people who do, we have shorter kid friendly edits of these episodes called smologies, and those are linked in the show notes where you can go directly