Clams bury themselves in the mud for the winter

Al Lowe
Contributor

The clam is not a very exciting animal. It doesn’t have much to say, it is not very active, and it is generally thought of as being quite dull.
There are some interesting things about clams, though, and I bet you don’t know about many of them. The clams we have here in Northern Ontario don’t make much of an impression. We don’t eat them, and most of the time we don’t even see them.
If you ever lived on the east coast, you would likely know quite a bit about clams. For one thing, they are very good to eat. Every town along the seashore in the Maritimes on New England has little shops which sell clams - usually fried. And are they ever good!
You can get your own clams, too. If you go ‘clamming’, you usually do it when the tide is out. As you walk along the beach, you keep your eye out for little holes in the sand. At these clam holes, you shove you clam fork down, and flip it up quickly, then put your clam in the bucket. In most places, it is not too hard to get a pail of clams in a fairly short time.
Clams live on shore in shallow water, or, if the water is salt, on sand flats where the tide brings the water in and takes it away every day. They totally depend on water. The clam has two openings, called siphons, one, the vertral (lower) one brings in water containing food particles and oxygen. The other one, the dorsal (upper) one gets rid of waste products and carbon dioxide.
Clams have a double shell, each part called a valve. They belong to a class of animals called Bivalvia. This includes things like mussels, guahogs, oysters, scallops, cockles and just plain shells. These two shells are fastened together by a very strong ligament, and opened and closed by two strong muscles.
The clam has quite a few organs in itself. Its mouth is really just a protected hole. It has rudimentary stomach, intestine, kidneys and heart. Blood is colourless and is pushed around by this little heart. It breathes by means of gills, and it has organs of equilibrium, and sensitivity.
The main part of the clam is the foot. This is large and muscular, and is the best part for eating. The clam can pull itself along with its foot, and bury itself in the sand or the mud.
Clams themselves form a really big business on the seashore. And if you look at its relatives, oysters, mussels and the like, you can see that trade in these marine animals runs into many millions of dollars.
The clams we have here in the north are usually quite small. They are common in all freshwater streams, lakes and ponds. They form food for many other animals - fish, birds and so on, and they do some good by scavenging along the bottom.
Clams here in the north bury themselves in the mud - that versatile foot again - and that’s how they spend the winter.
The clam is a part of a very large group of animals - the Mollusks. There are over 50,000 different species of mollusks. Our northern clam, Spharium solitdulum, is not a very prominent player in this group.