They clap. They swim. They have dozens of eyes and 2 million babies. They are scallops. Pectinidologist Dr. Samantha Lynch climbs aboard to share stories of theft on the brackish seas, gossip about scallops vs. oysters, ponderings on Disney bras, months without Rs, bay scallops, sea scallops, filter feeders, shellfish volunteering, curious baby bivalves, seagrass, red tides, and free buffets. We also check in with James Beard Award-nominated chef Miles Thompson who offers cooking tips (with a fair warning for vegetarians.) Also: a 507 year old bivalve and Alie’s TMI endocrinology odyssey. A real whopper of an episode!

Oh hey, it's your waitress who just innocently upsold you to the bucket of garlic fries.

Allie Ward, I'm back with a fresh episode of Ologies.

But also I'm saying pectinidology, which is difficult to say, but I found it exactly 1 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' ridgy shells.

But yeah, scallops, Not only are they iconic on everything from mermaid attire to gasoline company logos But also you may have eaten 1 and they can flippy flap swim.

We're gonna get into all of it But first thank you so much to everyone at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting the show for a dollar or more a month and submitting your questions.

Thanks to everyone who shares episodes with friends and to the folks who rate and leave reviews.

I read them all every week to brighten my days, such as this 1 from Sadie Jane, who said that, all of these got them through so many long days and nights during their daughter, Rosie's first year of life.

And also said that I have golden retriever energy, which I appreciate.

And yes, I'd love a photocopy of your PhD, Dr.

Send it to PO Box 2121, LA, California, 90078.

Also, I'll take postcards from anyone's summer adventures.

Okay, we're going to get into it with a guest who was highly recommended by your favorite urban Rodentologist, which was a fan favorite episode and it made me cry about sewer rats.

I'm gonna link that in the show notes for you.

But this expert for this episode did their undergrad at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in biology, got a master's in biology while belonging to the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, and then went to Rutgers for a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

So we're going to ask the not smart questions to learn all about the gossip of scallops versus oysters, why they have so many dang eyes.

We'll talk about shell ruffles, Disney bras, months without Rs, bay scallops, sea scallops, filter feeders, shellfish volunteering, curious baby bivalves, seagrass, red tides, free buffets, and even check in with the James Beard Award nominated chef, Miles Thompson, with some cooking tips with a fair warning right before if you're a vegetarian.

And also things like changing career paths and theft on the brackish tides with pectinidologist, Dr.

If you want to like go into Sam, I answer to that just as easily as Samantha.

And now, from what I understand, you had dinner with Dr.

Bobby Corrigan, who is an urban rodentologist.

I'm so jealous because I've never met him in person.

You never know who you're going to 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.

Corrigan 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.

I honestly cried recording his episode just because talking about rats, I was like,

I've never felt this way about rats before.

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 in the show notes alongside ones on corals and shells and snails and squids and fish, we got covered.

That question has followed me throughout my entire career.

And it's okay, no, it's what I always anticipate and the answer is no.

And then everybody goes, oh no, should I not eat them?

I'm allergic to shrimp And this is not based on anything scientific.

I just then avoided most all shellfish-like creatures.

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

Lynch is studying the health and wellbeing 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't eat too many of them or they don't eat them not safely.

And as I've mentioned on some other episodes, part of just living on planet Earth as a human means impacting other creatures.

Some big, some teeny tiny, just walking on roads.

It's tough ethically no matter how hard you try.

But theologists studying the ecology are looking to improve the bigger picture, either locally or globally.

little bit of maybe an East Coast accent?

So I'm originally from South Florida, but when I 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?

We do actually, though, have a nice population of bay scallops on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

And actually 1 of the, I believe it's 1 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 1970s.

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 bay scallops, the little ones.

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 as some from Maine are out there.

They're looking for the goods in the sea.

And the US, fun fact, has the largest sea scallop fisheries on the planet.

So the good news is, is that ecologically scientists are into this.

They're on board that boat Because aquaculture has its benefits, but there's also some considerable side eye, according to several papers, such as the legendary 2000 study, effect of aquaculture on world fish supplies.

So this was published in the journal nature and it called out fish farming for being a bigger environmental burden because people had to go out and catch a shitload of wild fish to feed the farmed fish.

But then there's scallop farming, which relies on a food source that's already floating in the water.

So it can improve water quality, having things like scallops, filter feeding, but it's not cheap, especially since sea scallops, which can live up to 20 years, can take 3 years to become adults.

So some farmed sea scallops have to get a little hole drilled in their shell to hang on a line.

And they put those sometimes in depths of 75 to a hundred feet below the surface.

Now, as for bay scallops, they're much smaller.

They're found in shallow waters, but of course with either type, their meat is prized as a delicacy.

Well, how did you end up as someone who, with a shellfish allergy, how did you wind up being a scalipologist?

Which is a I feel like maybe a little bit of a rare niche to hold.

Yeah I guess I kind of fell into it sideways a little bit.

I wanted to study dolphin behavior or whale songs, like all those marine mammals.

And after doing a little prodding, 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 3 and a half hour drive from the beach, but the draw to dolphins is understandable.

Justin Gregg of the recent two-part dolphinology episodes about dolphins.

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 excitement that she wanted.

Fewer weird research scandals than dolphins, trust me, but still a thrill.

It was just so cool to just be standing outside and to watch a honeybee swarm just take off, suddenly take off en masse and fly out to their new nest site.

The sound was so loud, the buzzing of their wings.

sit there and go, wow, 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.

They were on a mission, but it was just so cool to realize that I just got to witness something that not everybody gets to witness and be a part of.

So that definitely opened my eyes to how cool research was and is.

But it also, through that experience, I realized that I did not want to study honeybees for the rest of my life.

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, honeybees and I should probably go our separate ways.

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 there 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, hey, you wanna 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 stabbed 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 eutrophication.

So eutrophication 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 can have 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 eutrophication.

And so that's when things get out of balance and this kind of delicate balance in the ecosystem gets thrown off and then you see big die-offs in certain parts?

So you have these submerged aquatic vegetation, these seagrass beds, that in a healthy estuary will oftentimes 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.

Sally- But no place for, say, a small fish to hide or a bay scallop to hide.

So your seagrass beds provide that spatial refuge.

When you have these algal blooms that just get out of control, they block the sunlight from penetrating into the water.

So just like the plants in your backyard, they need sunlight to grow and survive.

And so when these algal mats block that sunlight, the seagrass beds die off.

So in the big chain of things, these giant algal blooms keep things shady.

So shady, seagrass is like, you have killed our food, our light.

And the seagrasses 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.

And now, wait, okay, we got to hold the phone here because you're like, there's no place for a scallop to hide.

And it just occurred to me, scallops are like free range chickens and mussels and oysters are hanging onto something?

I never even thought that scallops are like buddy and like they don't need to hang onto a rock.

What are they doing with the big coin full of delicious in the middle?

Why aren't they using little threads to hang onto rocks?

Well, I'm going to kind of talk here specifically about bay scallops and bay scallops are bivalves.

So they're in the same class as your oysters and your mussels and your clams.

They're kind of like the charismatic species of bivalves.

They look at you with those little blue eyes and they're pretty darn cute.

So as you mentioned, oysters, they cement 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 oyster's not hiding.

It just closes up its shell real tight in hopes that somebody doesn't come along and you shuck it off the clump.

And your muscles, they're attaching using those little hairy bissel threads.

Your clams are mobile, but they're usually just kind of going up and down in the sediment.

They can occasionally use their little foot to crawl around, but they're definitely not swimming like we see bay scallops do and other scallops as well.

But at 1 point in a bay scallop's life history, they do kind of use bissel threads to attach to the seagrass blades.

Oh, did they do that when they're tiny little babies?

Yeah, actually when they're a little bit bigger than tiny little babies.

So bay scallops, they start out their life in the water column as free swimming pelagic larvae.

So they're kind of floating around there in the water column.

And actually, can we talk about how bay scallops reproduce?

We're definitely going to get to scallop fucking because people have questions.

So yes, Put a pin in that because for sure, I'm still like, what's the difference between a bay scallop and a sea scallop, but we're also going to get to that.

So first off, there are over 300 species of scallop.

Neither did I, but only 1 of them is Argopectin iridians, the bay scallop.

Again, bay 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.

I do it wrong, but they live in shallow coastal waters and they have a shorter lifespan too.

Now sea scallops, them's the bigger boys and we'll talk more on their sex later, but they live from the tide to about 100 meters deep, But some species and subspecies have really specific and even deeper niches.

Also, sea scallops tend to live much longer, but probably not as long as Ming, who was a clam found in 2006 off the coast of Iceland that scientists estimated was over 400 years old, this clam, until they did more analysis and they discovered that Ming was actually 507.

And a headline about Ming read, scientists discover world's oldest clam Killing it in the process the world's oldest clam.

They're like, let's check the date Oops, and if you feel like crying you can please enjoy a free ticket to the Wikipedia page list of longest living organisms which tells the tales of number 16 a 43 year old spider or the still alive Bobby which is a Portuguese dog who is on the cusp of millennial and Gen Z, having been born in 1992.

Now I accidentally clicked on Bobby's page because I needed serotonin and dopamine.

And I found out that he was the only 1 of his litter to survive because the man who owned the wood pile he was born on did not want to care for puppies.

But Bobby was wood colored and survived that incident, which was carried out by the father of Bobby's current owner.

So Bobby's owner's dad killed all of his siblings.

Well, Bobby's siblings, not his own son's siblings.

But at Bobby's last birthday, his owner said, Bobby is special because looking at him is like remembering the people who are part of our family and are unfortunately no longer here, like my father, my brother, or my grandparents who have already left this world, said, "'But I like to think that Bobby has existed longer "'than any other dog on earth as a simple and faithful "'fuck you to that guy who didn't even want him to live.

As a palate cleanser though, I read about a beetle that took a 47 year nap as a baby larva and then emerged from some staircase in England being like, morning, but we're not here for beetles, we're not here for bobby, or even for 500 year old clams, which unlike scallops, cannot swim.

So bay scallops, they're swimming tiny little babies, like larva?

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 D as in dog, veliger, larvae.

So a veliger is a planktonic larva and it means sail bearing.

And if you are desperate to know how different groups of the same species have regional wiggles, you can see the 1996 paper, Velligers from different populations of sea scallop have different vertical migration patterns.

you can call it like a straight hinge larvae.

They have shells by 48 hours after fertilization.

So they have these little shells and they have like a little velum that sticks out with cilia on it.

And that allows them to swim and eat and explore the water column and try not to get eaten.

So 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.

And they do this by moving in like a clockwise helix.

So this little like spiral as they're going up and down in the water column.

And they do that for about 2 weeks until finally, hopefully, they land in a patch of seagrass.

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 bit larger, they're maybe like fingernail size at this point and they crawl up on the blades of eelgrass or turtlegrass or whatever seed grass you have there in that particular ecosystem.

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

They don't want to go too high because gulls could come down and eat them.

So they orient themselves kind of in the middle and they use bissel 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 growing and they stay on those blades as long as they can until eventually they just get too heavy for their little bistel 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?

Are they popping up every couple of days or every couple of minutes?

So no, they're usually right on the surface.

You'll find them just right there on the benthic surface.

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Pectinidology (SCALLOPS) with Samantha Lynch