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The common blenny is an inshore fish that can spend brief periods out of the water, where it waits to surprise unsuspecting scientists. This article is delight
by DoreenMichele 3y ago
The common blenny is an inshore fish that can spend brief periods out of the water, where it waits to surprise unsuspecting scientists.
This article is delightful.
I clicked through to the video in the last paragraph about ancient clam gardens. The events of The Irish Potato Famine[1] have been on my mind in recent weeks and I don't really know where to go with this thought rattling around in my head. But I've been thinking that if the Irish had somehow supported clam digging for families in crisis due to the Potato Famine such that they didn't eat them raw and end up sick, that could have gone differently.
So it's interesting to see that clam gardens are being restored in my neck of the woods and that provides potential local food security to hedge against supply chain issues and other stresses in the world today.[2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36690467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36690467
[2] https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/climate-resilience-and-clam-gardens https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/climate-resilience-and...
- bobthepanda 3y agoGenerally speaking the issue is scale. Oysters are also currently being restored in New York. They had largely disappeared and one of the reasons was over-consumption; at one point there were a billion oysters being harvested per year. The current goal is to just get back to one billion at all. https://untappedcities.com/2022/08/04/history-new-york-oysters/ https://untappedcities.com/2022/08/04/history-new-york-oyste...
- londons_explore 3y agoOysters love organic pollution. Pipe some sewage into a bit of shallow sea with a rocky seafloor and in a matter of months you'll have a billion oysters. The best oyster farms grow kinda close to sewage outlets...
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe problem was that until recent decades, New York harbor was so full of pollution it was overwhelming the oysters. (19 million people's worth of sewage and runoff is a lot.) A couple of large investments into waste treatment plants and now it is slowly getting back on its feet.
- arrosenberg 3y agoThe Irish genocide happened because the British took their food and only left them with potatoes, which were suffering from a fungal disease. What makes you think the Empire would have let them keep their clams?
- smegger001 3y agoBecause clams don't travel well in a world before refrigeration.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThey can if they’re canned.
- hgomersall 3y agoAmerican independence well predated canning.
- bobthepanda 3y agoI thought we were talking about the potato famine?
- hgomersall 3y agoOh, I thought it was a reference to the oysters from New York being claimed by the British.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoIreland was very much an agrarian place at the time, with very little manufacturing or heavy industry. I'm not at all sure there would have been support for industrial-scale canning.
- arrosenberg 3y ago