I'm a mathy by trade who accidentally ended up working in the field of biology. So the best part of my job is I get to constantly learn new things about neat-o critters. It's like when you're watching David Attenborough in Planet Earth and he's all excited about the Tibetan Fox with the square head, or in Life, there's that Pebble Toad that throws itself down cliffsides like a bouncy ball. Oh! Or that fungus that infects insects so that they go mental and crawl to the highest spot they can so, that when their head explodes with fungus spores it will infect more of the colony, but if the other ants see the infected ant acting strangely they carry him away forthwith so his exploding spore head won't destroy them all. If you haven't watched David Attenborough narrate a BBC special about the awesome things nature comes up with, go do that now. Start with the birds of paradise, whose mating dances are even more hillarious than some humans I know.
Back? So, mussels. Not as cool as the crazy-making fungus, but still neat. I'm not talking about the dreaded zebra mussel, I'm talking about all of the native mussels who have been ousted from the Great Lakes by zebra mussels, many of which are endangered. These guys have a parasitic phase as larvae where they hang out on a fish host for a few weeks before they metamorphose into juvenile mussels, being ever so handily dispersed to wherever the host fish has swam in that time.
But how do they got onto the fish? I'm glad you asked! Some mussels just spew thir larvae into the water and hope for the best, but the cool ones have lures that look like fish food that they wave around, spewing the larvae (called glochidia!) when the fish gets near. EDIT: just found an awesome youtube video of some lures
The SUPER AWESOME BADASS mussels take it a step futher and actually grab onto the fish's head for maximum glochidia attachage.
But the real reason I was compelled to share all of this is because of the mussel species I'm currently modelling, the Mudpuppy mussel. It uses the Mudpuppy as a host (you don't say!), which of course I had to look up because we did not cover this in any of my math courses, nor was it mentioned in my one undergraduate biology course.
And I found this:
If a reindeer with a dragon great grandmother mated with a puppy and had a mutant amphibian child, this is what it would look like. I want one.
If you came here looking for a recipe, this mussel dish looks tasty, although I haven't tried it. Just don't eat my endangered mussels please, you'll mess up my numbers :P
I think this is a SUPER AWESOME BADASS blog!
ReplyDeleteDr Z