Ologies with Alie Ward - Pectinidology (SCALLOPS) with Samantha Lynch

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

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!Follow Dr. Samantha Lynch on InstagramFollow Miles Thompson of Baby BistroA donation went to ReClam the BayMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Oceanology (THE OCEAN), Biomineralogy (SHELLS), Cnidariology (CORAL), Echinology (SEA URCHINS & SAND DOLLARS), Teuthology (SQUIDS), Ichthyology (FISHES), Delphinology (DOLPHINS), Black American Magirology (FOOD, RACE + CULTURE), Indigenous Cuisinology (NATIVE COOKING), Malacology (SNAILS & SLUGS), Chickenology (HENS & ROOSTERS), Oology (EGGS), Environmental Toxicology (POISONS + TRAIN DERAILMENT)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Mark David ChristensonTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's your waitress who just innocently absolved you to the bucket of garlic fries. Alieward, I'm back with a fresh episode of allergies. Scalops, you're asking? Scalops, I'm saying. But also, I'm saying pectinidology, 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, ridgy shells. We're going to get into it.

But yeah, scallops, not only are they iconic on everything from mermaid attire to gasoline company logos, but also you may have eaten one and they can flipy flap swim. We're going to get into all of it. But first, thank you so much to everyone at patreon.com slash allergies 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 one from Sadie Jane who said that allergies 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.

Also congratulations to Audrey Burnham, and yes, I'd love a photocopy of your PhD, Dr. Burnham. Send it to PO Box 2121, LA, California at 9.0078. Also I'll take postcards from anyone's summer adventures. Send them away kiddos. Okay, we're going to get into it with a guest who was highly recommended by your favorite urban road entologist, which was a fan favorite episode, and it made me cry about sewer rats. I'm going to 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 Nott's Mart questions to learn all about the gossip of scallops versus oysters. Why they have so many dang eyes? Wait, they have eyes. We'll talk about shell ruffles, Disney bras, months without ours, base gallops, sea scallops,

filter feeders, shellfish, volunteering, curious baby bivalves, sea grass, 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 vegetarian. And also, things like changing career paths and theft on the brackish tides with pectinodologist Dr. Samantha Lynch, she heard. And I go by Sam, if you want to go into Sam, I answered that just as easily as Samantha. Okay, good. We can get casual about scallops. Shell, good. We can get casual about scallops. Shell, yes. And now from what I understand, you had dinner with Dr. Bobby Corrigan, who is an urban

roadontologist. Is that correct? Yes, 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 Dr. 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. 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 Dr. 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. Hmm. Do you guys eat scallops? I got a lot for this question. You know, it's so funny. That question has followed me throughout my entire career. And it's like, no, it's what I always anticipate.

And the answer is no. Okay. And then everybody goes, oh no, why 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. I'm definitely one of their advocates. So, so Dr. 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't eat too many of them, or they don't 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 sucks, 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. Now, did you grow up on the East Coast? You have a little bit of maybe an East Coast

accent? Yeah, yeah. 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? No, there aren't any. Okay. We do actually, they'll have a nice population of base scallops on the golf 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 1970s. The population 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 scallops, the little 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 as some remain, 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. Okay, but what about just growing them? What if you want to farm them? So the good news 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 shit load 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 three years to become adults, and also the labor can be costly. 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 100 feet below the surface. Now as for base 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 scalapologist, which is if 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. Like a lot of 10 year old kids, I fell in love with dolphins.

Ah! Like a lot of 10 year old kids, I fell in love with dolphins. 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 three and a half hour drive from the beach, but the draw to dolphins is understandable. Just ask Dr. Justin Gregg of the recent two-part Dolphinology episodes about dolphins.

I'll link them in the show notes. But yes, with that long 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 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. 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. Are you allergic to them at all? Yes, yes. Oh no. Yes, 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, visa,

and I should probably go our separate ways. Oh. Go waggle dance that direction. Honeybee's and I should probably go our separate ways. Go waggle dance that direction. I'd very 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 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 lecture for recess 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 want to work with some oysters over here? And so I thought, 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, whereas she did her master's thesis. Comparative developmental sensitivities of sea urchin and oyster embryos in larvae to metal nanoparticles, because I wanted to ask questions regarding the impacts of eutrification. So eutrification is basically like the nutrient loading of a bay or 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 dios 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? Yes, yes, exactly. 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. Your bottom is always bare. But no place for say a small fish to hide or a base 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. And so seagrass is a plant. 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 just 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 ruined things for everyone. And now, wait, okay, we gotta hold the phone here because you're like, there's no place for a scallop to hide. And it just occurred to me scall Scalops are like free-range chickens and mussels and oysters are hanging on to something? Yes. Okay. Okay. I never even thought about that. I never even thought that scallops are like, buyy and like they don't need to hang on to a rock. Okay. Take me back. What is

a scallop? What are they? Who are they related to? 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 gonna kind of talk here specifically about base scallops and base scallops are bivalves. So they're in the same class as your oysters and your muscles and your clams. 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 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, noister's not hiding. It just closes up at Shell Real Tite and hopes that somebody doesn't come along and you just shut it off the clump. Oh, shucks. And your muscles,

they're attaching using those little hairy bistle 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 base scallops, too, and other scallops as well. But at what point in a base scallops life history, they do kind of use bissol threads to attach to the seagrass blades. Oh, did they do that when they were tiny little babies? Yeah. Actually, when they're a little bigger than tiny little babies.

So 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 base scallops 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. OK, so first off, there are over 300 species of scallop. Did you know that? Neither did I, but only one of them is arcopectin-eridians, 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 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, seascaubs 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 Red. 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 one of his literature survive because the man who owned the woodpile he was born on did not want to care for puppies, so he did something terrible to them. 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.

That would be his own sons. 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 is 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 a some staircase in England being like, learning, 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 based scallops, they're swimming tiny little babies. Yeah. Like larva? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so they're swimming little tiny baby larvae.

They're actually called, and this is Trufort Wasteers as well, and a lot of your bivalves, they call them D, like D is in dog, villager, larvae. So a villager 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, velagers 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 48 hours after fertilization. Oh, okay. Or you can call it like a straight hinge larvae. And they have shells. They have shells by 48 hours after fertilization. Oh my God. So fast. Yes. There's little shells and they have like a little vealum 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 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 little spiral is 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 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 turtle grass or whatever sea 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 snacked upon by snails or crabs

below the grass. They don't wanna go too high, because goals could come down and eat them, so they orient themselves kind of in the middle, and they use bistle threads to hold on to those sea grass 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 bistle 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 just under the sand? Are they popping up every couple of days or every couple of minutes? So no, they're usually right on 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 bury, they don't dig or bury down in.

You'll find them just right there on the benthic surface, just a side note. I didn't know what benthic 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. It's full of gorgeous biological illustrations of diatoms.

It's on my coffee table. Looking into it, he was also what some people call a proto-nazi. And for more on that, you can see the book, Ernst Heikl's Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology. So now, I have this book. I didn't know this guy was awful, and I don't know what to do with this big beautiful book But I urge anyone working on a marvel or a DC franchise

To make a supervillain who lives in Atlantis and is named Ben Thos But yes, Sam says that scallops don't dig themselves under the mud too much They're usually on that benthic surface, you know, just hanging around. 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. What are they eating, especially if they need to be making a shell out of calcium? 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 algae can pack a ton of minerals, including potassium and iron and magnesium and calcium. And for more on this, you can see the biomineralogy 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 do base scallops get in comparison to sea scallops? Which ones are the quarter-sized ones,

and which are the dime-sized, or what size is what when we're used to eating them? And again, that's not the whole scallop in there. Yes, so you can eat both base scallop and sea scallops. Base scallops can be sometimes, I think, a little bit harder to obtain. If you are eating base scallops, they likely came from China. China actually has the largest,

like, aquaculture fishery for base scallops. We don't hear it in the United States. So if you're eating a base scallop, it most likely came from China. And when you're eating a base scallop, you're not eating the entire scallop. That little like, sure, it always reminds me of like a banana slice.

Yeah, so that's the adductor muscle. So in a scallop, whether it's a bay or a sea scallop, that's what's usually served. It's just the adductor muscle there, that little coin shaped piece of tissue. And that's the thing that keeps them slam 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 the oyster, 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 the coral and what that is, it's 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 there. They're going to add on material. Oh, interesting. If you're like scallops are orange spot, the big orange tissue is there, they're going to add on material. Oh, interesting. If you're like scallops are orange inside, you can cut 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. So 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 ziazanthin, which also makes goji berries and egg yolks just blaze like sunsets. And for more on eggs, you can see the recent

chickenology two-parter, or the classic uology episode. Oh, and if a scallop has a lot of that pigment, then that fleshy coin that you see on plates might be kind of a warmer orange hue too. Now, what else is crammed in there under that shell? So obviously we see a beautiful scallop shell. Let's say that you are to look inside one. What exactly is going on in there? What kind of organs do they have? Do they have lungs?

Do they have a stomach? Do they have a, do they have a butthole? Like what's in there? It's such a mystery. Yeah. So when you open one up, the first thing that is going to catch your eye is probably that a doctor 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 gonadal 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. Ooh, okay. Sounds fancy. Yeah, and that functions as a little bit of like a liver. It's not a liver, but it's kind of in August to a liver for scallops. Wasters have them too. And so there's a lot of detoxification occurring in their hepatophenchrius. Well, they're filtering so much. You've got to 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 use to kind of canary in a coal mine, the situation, and shellfish are kind of stuck where they are. I mean, even base scallops that can swim away, they're not going to be able to go from Barnaget Bay, New Jersey, and just swim away to St. Joseph's Bay in Florida.

For better conditions. So they're really, really good monitoring systems, and we use the hepatic pancreas to do that. You can run different antioxidant assays on it to determine if their antioxidant levels are elevated or perhaps depleted. And according to the 2020 paper, antioxidant defenses of flame scallop exposed to the water soluble fraction of used vehicle crankcase 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 you know that. Most people don't. But it's not even closely related to scallops. It looks like a scallop. It's called a scallop. It's not a scallop. So what does this have to do with scallops? Don't worry.

I spent some time chilling with the 2021 paper, temporal changes in physiological responses of base scallop, performance of antioxidant mechanism in arcopectin irradiance in response to sudden changes in physiological responses of base gallup, performance of antioxidant mechanism in arcopectin irradiance, in response to sudden changes in habitat salinity. That's from the journal antioxidants. And it said that not even accounting for water contaminants, but even just the stress of changing salinity due to recent trends in global warming, it produces oxidative stress that cannot be resolved by the scallops antioxidant mechanism, suggesting that excessive generation of reactive oxygen species can lead to cell

death, aka apoptosis. So all that chaos is happening inside the comb of their shell, in addition to that puck of briny string cheese meat that you may have seen on a menu. So all that is 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 silia 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 moustache 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 hairs that can move. Do you think that they have a preference for certain types of algae or do you think that they're just sucking stuff in and being like this is organic, plant matter and I'm going to eat it? So they definitely have a size preference. You're not saying. And there has been some really extensive work done on maybe not so much what base gallopsy 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. I think a lot of times it falls down to size of the algae. They can be a little picky on that. May I offer you a gander at the paper, Food of the Oyster, which notes that 88% of the oysters food supply is composed of diatomes. But they also eat kind of slim margins of spores. They have some particles of seaweed.

They eat 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 50 gallons of water a day, just digesting what they like and just booting the rest out their poop shoot. So why are people like whispering to oysters like fine dining waiters in lab coats being like, what can I get you? Because according to global newswire, oyster farming made nearly $8 billion worldwide in

2022 and the demand just goes up every year. made nearly $8 billion worldwide in 2022. And the demand just goes up every year. Now by comparison, the Atlantic Sea Scalant Market was valued at $670 million in 2021. How should you feel about all this? Well, in the Oceanology episode with Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, she said, no, that's real.

And I think with aquaculture, where that kind of industry kind industry got a rough start, but they are figuring out sustainable practices. There's a lot of, most exciting work in that space for me is around integrated farming or vertical ocean farming or what's called 3D ocean farming. And it's about growing oysters and mussels and clams and all these different kinds of algae together

in a simplified ecosystem that kind of creates habitat for other things to swim through as well. Algae is super, super healthy and underrated. Sea vegetables as they're now sometimes called in hip spots. So eat more algae, farm shellfish. You can eat with impunity as much as you want those oysters, mussels, clams. Because they actually just filter the water so we don't have to catch wild fish to feed the farmed fish, which is a problem with some other species. Although they're also innovating feeds

from plant proteins and insect proteins to feed to fish now. So that industry is coming along well. So what I personally eat is those things. Okay, but what about fashion? Now scallops have shells that are very distinct, right? So what I personally eat is those things. 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 by valves, 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's they don't come in 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 sizes, but some of your sea scallops can get to be a little bit larger, but definitely not a base scallop that might prevent a little like nip slip. That's about as far as those little base scallops are going to 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 trawling the sea bed floor to gather them all up. So the divers scall gallops, they tend to be bigger,

they tend to be harvested better, and these divers' scallop 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 mermaid wearing scallops on her boobs? I don't know, ask Glen Keane, the legendary Disney animator who first sketched and created her whole look. Let's talk about him. So he has a condition known as aphantasia where he can't picture things in his mind. He can't picture them. He's a Disney animator who created Ariel and so many other characters and he can't imagine things. And yes, we definitely need an episode on this. And yes, that is amazing and inspiring that he's had this career.

And he modeled Ariel off of his beloved wife, Linda, who he met in 1975 in line for the movies. They were both waiting to get in to see the Godfather. They got married eight days later, and they've been together for decades. Also, Glenn's dad created the comic, The Family Circus. Back to scallops. I realized I forgot to ask a not smart question.

Is it really different living in fresh water? Or is it Bay? A Bay isn't fresh water. Are there fresh water scallops? No, no. So they're an estuarine species, which means that you find them in somewhat brackish water. So lower salitis 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 forming that mix, and these base scallops as well as their other estering neighbors, they've had to adapt to what is essentially a constantly changing environment. The salinity changes rapidly with incoming tides, outgoing tides, big rainfall events. They can experience temperature swings, a lot of tidal exchange. So one of the reasons white oysters can shut up so tight is because twice a day, they can just get totally exposed to air and have to wait out for the next title exchange. Oh, that makes sense. They're left high and dry. Pretty good.

Yeah. 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 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 bifinals, which are human-made chemicals that were banned for manufacture in 1979, but there's just still leaking from a bunch of stuff. And if fish eat fish who have eaten PCBs, then you're eating PCBs 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. For more on this stuff, you can see the Environmental Tax Collegiate episode. We did a few months back after the East Palistine train derailment. And I'm so sorry, this episode happens to have an unusual number of bummers. I don't know how this is magnetized so many bummericides. But I mean, I'm not sorry that they're in here.

I'm sorry that the world has an unusual number of bummers. But scientists like Sam are trying to figure this stuff out and fix it. All those kind of nasty things coming into your coastal water bodies. The other thing that these coastal water bodies have to face when I touched on it before with the u-triification. 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 produce toxins that can result in fish kills and even shellfish kills. One of the reasons why we have such a declining base cow population was from some really, really big brown and red tides that came through in the 70s. 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 1975 paper in the Journal of Environmental Letters, titled Effects of the 1971 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 extrepatients of shallow water reef biotas, and can significantly alter the flora and fauna there for years to come. So down on the reefs, ecologically, a big red tide event like that sounds a little bit like our apocalypse movies, but on shore, it can look tide event like that sounds a little bit like our apocalypse movies, but on shore, it can look a little like spring break.

Have you heard of the term of jamboree? Is that what a jamboree is? I feel like I heard this in the gulf that there are these events where there's an algae, bloom, and it kills off so many shellfish that they just come running up to the beach. And so people will hear of one coming, and then they'll just go to the beach and just scoop up so many crabs and other things that come up to the surface.

Ooh, to eat them? Yeah, to eat them because they're just like out running like a lack of oxygen. But it ends up being just like a buffet for locals essentially. So I don't know, I gotta look into that. Maybe I'll put that in a side. Oh, the best of times and worst of times, you know?

Okay, I got this word wrong. All right, are you happy? I got it wrong. It's a Jubilee. Now, a jamboree apparently is an old timey word and it means a quarousle or a noisy drinking bout some merry making, but a Jubilee is an anniversary or a rejoicing, and it

comes from the word for to-n-up a ram horn for party times. And according to a widely trusted etymological source, the original jubilee was a year of a emancipation of enslaved people and a restoration of lands. That is a biblical thing, which reminds me also that June 10th approaches, and that too is a celebration of a man's patient. Now June 19th, 1865, Union Soldiers announced in Galveston, Texas that anyone still enslaved was free, and that was the last place in the U.S. to get this news. And on that note, we have a great episode with Dr. Syke Williams-Forson on Black Magangerology, which is all about race, culture, and food. And that came

out a couple weeks ago. It is a fine way to prep for acknowledging that holiday. But a Jubilee can also mean in some Gulf Coast states, a seafood buffet at the beach. New, tonight at 6, what appears to be a Jubilee on the Eastern Shore. Look at this. Jubilee's a curve 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 feel a little, 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 epiphen. You would need like five epiphen. Also, so you're good. You're like, no, 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 to be not careful. So in the wake of a 2017 red tide, Jubilee, the director of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, Matt Hill told a local newspaper outlet that, quote,

currently, our samples don't indicate there are toxins present in the water. So the seafood is likely safe. However, the seafood should still be handled, stored, and cooked properly. Also, if any of the seafood is dead and looks like it's been dead for a while, it's best not to eat it. Matt, you're a real one.

Thanks for that warning. So yes, should you encounter a rare Jubilee, you've got to check in locally to see about safety and fishing limits. Have you ever had diarrhea? Yes, should you encounter a rare Jubilee, you've got to check in locally to see about safety and fishing limits. Have you ever had diarrhea? It's never worth it. When you're talking to about what they're filtering, what about these tiny, tiny metallic

particles? I didn't even think about that. Are they precipitates in the water or are they just metal shavings from industry? So come from a couple different sources. One of it is we actually just manufacture metal nanoparticles. Titanium dioxide is in a lot of your sunscreen, 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 dioxide the ones and there it goes right in the water directly. Are the titanium dioxide 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. It came out perhaps a little faster than the ecological research could 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. They change a little bit. So a lot of that early testing was done with kind of like pristine

titanium dioxide nanoparticles and they failed to acknowledge and evaluate what happens with the altered particle, post UV exposure. But I think the research is catching up, so I don't want to, I don't want everybody to throw out their sunscreens. Yeah. I looked into this and the answer is kind of a defeated, just a whimpering sigh. So titanium oxide, there was a 2014 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 in water, and it directly affects the growth of phytoplankton. And thus, titanium dioxide nanoparticles cause direct ecological consequences. Now, at the same year, the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published the study,

Effects of Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles on Caribbean Reef Building Coral, which said that exposure to tiny titanium dioxide particles cause significant zoosanthelae exposure in all the colonies. And if you're doing a big, huh, I got you. Or rather, the eco-friendly sunscreen company Reef for a Pear does, and explained in a blog post to laypersons with the following statement. In really non-scientific terms, that means the coral threw up everything in its stomach. Coral's don't actually have stomachs, but if

they did, it would be like one of us hammering three bottles of cheap tequila by ourselves and trying to digest that amazing garlic burrito we ate just before calling an uber or an ambulance for home. You put your body under extreme stress and you're about to pay dearly for it. Thank you, Reefer pair. So word on the reef is that zinc oxide is the safer and better choice because it blocks harmful radiation better and it causes less ecological impact. But titanium dioxide is cheaper, so it persists. Now what about other metallic teeny-tainees? I looked at silver nanoparticles, that's another one that we manufacture in large amounts because it's got like an antimicrobial 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, end up in the water system, and then by way of water runoff, it enters our coastal ecosystems. So yeah, for more on this, see silver recovery from laundry wash water, roll of detergent chemistry, which was a 2018 Dartmouth 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 and waste water treatment plants.

So hey, be stinky. Just be stinky. I love it. The scallops love it. And then what happens when those nanoparticles get caught by that hepatic pancreatic organ? What happens when they wind 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, so that's one potential cause for

concern. If it's enough to start inducing a response in the oyster or the scallop, then you might begin to see elevated levels of antioxidants. You might see signs of tissue damage through lipid peroxidation, and then eventually, if the scallop or the oyster system just gets totally overwhelmed, then you begin to see like cell apoptosis and then the animal dies. 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 seagrass. And scallops are just still down there talking about the great seagrass bust of the 1970s. And from then on, these populations have just really struggled to regrow themselves. They just cannot get together and make enough babies to get the population back up. So they kind of follow a little bit of like a boom in bust population dynamic growth dynamic

there. And so we're in the, 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 really great restoration efforts underway, Virginia over at VIMS. They're working with space scallops to try to give them a lake up. Cornell is doing the same, trying to either set up things like they call them spawn or sanctuary's where you put out the adults in a good spot and in hope that they survive and reproduce. Other times they'll grow the larvae up to a certain stage in an aquaculture facility, in a hatchery, and then release them

into the water and hope that they get distributed to a good spot and grow up to be adults. So pectinologists are essentially just throwing scallop orgies and cross-nure fingers that these bivoules get a leg up even though they do not have legs. Okay, how are they mating? Are they seeing each other from across the bay and being like, I notice your 50,000 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 Bay scallops are they 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. Her mafrogites are common in the Bivalv 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. 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 in 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 gametes? You want to put out as many gametes as you can and you want You want to put out as many gametes as you can, and you want your neighbors to put out as many gametes as you can as well, because you don't really want self-fertilization. I mean, not that the scallop wants anything, but...

I get it. Anthropomorphizing here a little bit, but 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 they're a relatively short lifespan. They only live for a year to two years, 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. That 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 mussels, their broadcast spawners as well. But in oyster, you know, they've 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 they scallops a little less lucky because they're mobile. So they need to congregate. There needs to be a large enough population size so that even just by chance you have enough adults in a given area to release their gametes into this pool.

Is anybody out there? And then they eggs are fertilized by sperm and cleavage. So your division happens very quickly. And by 48 hours, you have a shelled devilager swimming larvae. Oh, just out in the world and hoping for the best, right? You're like, find that blade of seagrass, stay away from seagulls, watch out for snails. You got this 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 scallops, beautiful blue eyes are just amazing and a little creepy when they're looking at you. But they're very cool. Their eyes spots are an interesting kind of back toy 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 scallops, I think are the only organisms that we know up that use that mirror, that's a protein mirror in the back. They also have two retinas overlaid along each other. And so one of them provides like a frontal view for the scallop and the other retina provides peripheral vision. So they can kind of see all around. And that's in just one eye spot. And as you mentioned, they have many. They have that chain, that blue chain of see all around and that's in just one eye spot. And as you mentioned, they have many They have that chain that blue chain of eyes all along the front of their mantle there

And it's pretty cool. It allows them to detect dark moving objects So their visual acuity is is not what you and I see I think I've read that it's about a hundred times worse than the average humans eyesight, but compared to other shellfish, their view of the world is fantastic. Yeah, do are there other bivoules that even have eyes or eye spots? Yeah, so most of your bivoules do have eye spots, but they are capable of kind of detecting the presence or the absence of light. So they have these photo receptors. And so they can respond sometimes to some light cues. And that can be especially helpful when you're in that larval stage swimming around in the water column.

It's a very helpful adaptation to have given that you are mobile and you have the opportunity to escape predators. You know, so then tying that in with have the opportunity to escape predators. So then tying that in with the ability to detect those predators, I can see where those two things could go hand in hand. It doesn't help a noister to detect a predator coming. It doesn't matter. It can't go anywhere. She says 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, so 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? What's the closest thing to a brain a scallop has? So they kind of this ganglia that wraps around the ductile muscle. So they're able to process these cues that are coming in, but it's not like a cephalopod 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

Barnaget Bay and they're called Reclam the Bay. So hello to all of you out there. She says a lot of the volunteers are retyres and folks who are local who just wanna keep that body of water clean and healthy and have helped Sam by taking her out on boats for her work and letting her grow some scallops and they're just fantastic, she says. And their mission is to involve

and educate the public about the estuaries water quality and the care feeding life cycles and their mission is to involve and educate the public about the estuaries water quality and the care, feeding life cycles and the importance of shellfish. Also, reclaim the Bay, it's banger name. So a donation is going to reclamthebay.org and Sam's honor. If any of you are listening to this episode,

I'm sorry that I swear so much. Thank you to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible. Okay, let's crack into these queries for Sam, a pick ten-adologist. Okay, Eldersamora, Emily Kragger, and Kalecy want to know, what's with the ridges, essentially? Do the ridges in the shells have a purpose? Why don't clams or oysters have them? No purpose that I'm aware of. I think it is just a phenotypic characteristic of base scallops, but other scallops species as well, but no advantages or deleterious adaptation that I'm aware of. Ah, okay, good to know.

So of course, folks have argued and debated over the years what role shell shapes play, and there was a 2015 paper titled Anti-Predator Adaptations in a Great Scalop, a paleontological perspective, which put forth the theory that the shell structure of the scallop improves the mechanical strength, and it allows them to swim away from any mollusk crunching predators. Although, although, and I love a good fight, other shell experts say that those ribs increase weight a bunch, but they do give the shell more robust anti-predator benefits. But others could argue that swimming faster is their finest anti-predator strategy.

Depends on who you ask, also speaking of asking. Kayla Pilcher, Telia Dunjak, Evan Davis-Gordon-Hoss, Ali Brown, Alex Ertman, Jessica Krunkshank, and Asha Dermur, first-time question asker, wanted to know how they get from A to B in the C. A ton of people asked about their movement and in Asha Dermur's words, first-time question asker says, I completely love how they bounce

through the water like Pac-Man when they're startled. Are they the only creature that behaves like that? In Talia Dunyx words, how do they flap flap around the ocean? Flap flap. That's cute. Thank you. They are the most mobile of the bivalves for sure. They're the only swimming bivalves 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, a ductile muscle there to plant down that shell and it pushes the water basically out their back end and uses jet propulsion to to move forward. And by their back end, do you mean their butt or do you just mean the back end to the shell? The back end of the shell. Okay, I'm like, that's so much water to take in. And by their back end, do you mean their butt, or do you just mean the back end of the show? The back end of the show. The back end of the show.

Okay, I'm like, that's so much water to take in. I'm like, are they getting colonics daily? Okay, good to know. So just out the back end of the show. A ton of people, including for some question askers, marine puts and laser interlegator, as well as Katie Holtman 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 watertight as an oyster. But they can close up fairly well. If they don't want you to open them, it's not like you can wedge your

finger in. When they're closed, they're, 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 it'll be okay. A base scallop, however, you've got maybe an hour timeline there before you need to get them back in water because they aren't as tight and so they are drying out over that time. Is that because of their smaller doctor muscle or no, just the way that their shell is? I think it's just the way that their shell is. Their doctor muscle isn't necessarily smaller, they're just smaller.

Proportial, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. This next question was asked by Becky this ACGRA 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 microplastics, pesticides, heavy metals, etc. 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 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-Weddon wanted to know, said, back when I ate meat many years ago, I had a scallop and there was a small crunchy bit in it and that was it. I was done with scallops and all meat for that matter, no regurgitations. If you eat a scallop and you're done with 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 48 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. They're going to crunch. Okay, good to know. Good to know.

Scott Hanley and Ashley Sayer to Reves 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, I might not be the most cost effective way, but I don't know 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 LA kitchens of son of a gun and nobu and animal. He had his own restaurant, all 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 a new restaurant.

It's called Baby Bistro. It's in Koreatown here in LA. You can actually follow him at Miles Cooks on Instagram. And you have to DM Baby B-Stro on Instagram to get a table booking. Jerrod and I are going this week. I'm losing my mind. But anyway, eating scallops. It's been done for thousands and thousands of years by humans and according to traditional animal foods of indigenous peoples of northern North America. First nations like the Mcha-Mach populations

and Pacific Northwest coast diets have included scallops for millennia as well as many East Coast Indigenous populations. So humans have been eating scallops for a long time, but we're now going to chat about selecting harvesting and preparing scallops for the next eight minutes or so. So if you're vegetarian, you can go on and skip ahead. If you have accidentally cooked scallops incorrectly, keep listening. Also, everyone be careful with the knives. All right? OK, here is Chef Miles Thompson, doing me a favor. 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. They're a base scallops, they're the small kind of baby-sized scallops, and then diver scallops, which are the larger scallops and the shells, and then there's also frozen scallops. Now those are not in any order of preference or cooking, but I will say that the one I prefer to cook the least are frozen scallops, typically because they're treated with a chemical that causes them to weep out a milky liquid when they're thawed, and that makes it harder to sear them. So he's talking about sodium tripoli phosphate, or STPP for short. Sometimes it goes by a

pen name on food labels as E451, and it's used to bulk up and increase the weight of seafoods. It's also used in leather tanning and flameratardins. 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 scallop to work with is a live scallop, either a bay scallop or a diver scallop. And when you're buying these, if you can find them in a store or from a fishmonger, it is very important to find out where they're coming from. Ideally, you'll be getting wild scallops

so that they'll have the most flavor. And honestly, wild scallops will have the least impact, hopefully on the ecosystem, if you're getting it from people that have responsible picking practices. So how do you deal with these life scall scales when you have them home in your shell? Well, first thing to do is to have all of the equipment that you need. So what you'll need is a small palette knife or offset spatula or a thin bladed knife

that is not sharp on one end, basically a thin butter knife. That's a bit flexible. What you want to do is grab the scallop. There's a light side and dark side, one being flat, one being rounded. You want to put the flat side up and slowly eat your knife in and shave off the scallop muscle

from the top at this point, shell. That will pop open and then expose a beautiful scallop. It's row, it's digestive tract, and it's eyes or the skirt. The next thing you're gonna want to do is scrape underneath the scallop with contact with the shell with your knife or offset spatula and remove the full scallop and its entirety from the shell. Now what you're going to want to do is remove the four parts from each other.

You're going to remove the central scallop, quote unquote, the big guy. That's the a doctor muscle. By putting your thumb between the small side muscle of the scallop and the skirt and running your finger around the scallop to remove the scallop from everything else. Then you can pull off that small little chewy muscle. I don't really use that unless I'm making an exosauce 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 tract an orange or light colored rosac individually. The rosac is very nice if brined then

grilled or can be used to make sauces and then the last perhaps my favorite part of the scallop controversially or not is the skirt or the actual eyes. There are about 40 eyes around the scalp skirt. And what I like to do with this is I like to put in a basin of lightly salted water and scrub between my hands to remove any of the silt and the sand from where the scalp lives. Do this two or three times. This is beautiful wrapped around a stick and grilled like yakitori style, or you can make delicious sauces with it. But we're here to talk about the scalp itself.

The thing that is actually the a doctor muscle of the scallop, which before this episode, you just call the scallop because we all did. Everyone does. That meaty little puck. But let's start with the little ones, the base scallops. Mackendamian nuts. What you'll need is a cast iron pan, neutral oil, fine 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. They're a little more relaxed. They get a nice sear, but they don't get so rubbery and tough. Then you'll season them well, and by well, I mean, salt them with more salt than you think you should. Yes, chef. I want them to sit on a plate for about 20 minutes and so that the salt will absorb.

Then we want to get your cast iron pan very, very hot and put a nice screen of neutral oil in there. Also, again, more than you think you need. And get that smoking hot. Make sure you put on the exhaust fan in your kitchen and open a window. When it's smoking hot, lay your seasoned scallops in on any side. You don't need to put them particularly on the flat side. And just let them sear for a solid 30 seconds

until you start seeing a light brown line come up the side of the scallop. At this point, of the scallop. At this point, roll the scallops as if you were rolling a popcorn pan around on the top of the stove, so the exterior sides get a light sear on them and then dump them out into the tray,

line with parchment paper and paper towel. Remove them so they don't sit in their own grease, put them on a plate, serve with a lemon wedge. Beautiful. You can also serve them with the sauce or age, balsamic, or any of those kinds of things. Now, for the larger scallops, the diver scallops, the way you're gonna wanna cook those is similar but different, same, same, but different.

Yes, chef. You're gonna still want a cast iron pan, or a carbon steel pan, and the same neutral oil, same type of salt. You're gonna start with the same principles here. You're going to temper the scallop then season, allow it to sit for about 20 minutes to lightly cure and then get your pan hot. The only difference here is that while your scallop is curing, you're going to turn your

oven on to 290 degrees Fahrenheit. We're going to finish the scallop in the oven to ensure it even and more perfect cook in my mind. So what we're going to do is we're going to get that seasoned cured scallop, sear it hard again as we do the base scallops. And Miles says that unlike the smaller base scallops, the sea scallops are diverse scallops you want to sear on the flat side, not long and 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 scallop, you should, at this point, have a beautiful sear on the scallop if you're using cast iron, have a thick enough screen of oil. It will basically look like a seared hamburger, crazy. So, take the scallop out, flip it onto a small tray like a fajita-sized tray, and all the scallops you've seared flip them onto that tray, and let them rest for about two minutes to kind of equalize in temperature.

Then put them directly into the oven on the tray, and cook them for a few minutes until a thin-bladed knife or cake tester thin skewer, that's metal, inserted, and held there for about 10 seconds, and then put onto the bottom lip of your mouth, feels nice and warm, and then take them out and serve them. Lemon wedge, burblanc, whatever you want. Enjoy.

Yes, chef. You can find out more about him on Instagram at Miles Cooks. His food is art, and his new restaurant again is Baby Beastro with underscores after baby and Beastro. Okay, so you wanna check it out. Also the Somalye and Wine Perings top notch. Again, I'm very excited about going this week. And 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 voice note about scallops? He's Jared's best friend. And Miles officiated our wedding. Well, he co-efficiated with Dalyne Rodriguez from the recent field trip WGA Strike episode a few weeks ago. So we were 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 Wessel, said, my dad insisted that the tiny base scallops were the only ones worth eating, and that the larger ocean scallops were really made by punching holes in the wings of skates.

And then another patron chimed in, Kate Tildiz, said, actually, the skate wings thing could be true, I live on Cape Cod, and one of my best friends, a fisherman, said, this does happen. So I fact-check that, and yes, this can happen. So I fact check that. And yes, this can happen. One website said to look for cookie cutter, like, roundness in fake scallops because natural scallops won't be perfectly circular.

And also scallops should be a uniform height because skate wings naturally taper. So yeah, I guess it can happen. There are also fake scallops made from fish paste. So what if you're like, no one's gonna hoodwink me, I'm gonna catch them myself. Mackenzie King says, OMG, cowboy hat emoji.

I grew up in a small town on the west coast of Florida, Crystal River that goes nuts the first week in July when scallop season opens. I always wondered about their migration and what scallop season really means. Yes, so scallop season 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 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. Depending on the water body and the currents within that specific water body, you can have larval dispersal, I guess, as a way of migration. So sometimes larvae can be dispersed relatively long distances, just depending on how the water is flowing and where they are. So, for example, there's a pretty strong hypothesis that the populations off the coast of North Carolina have mixed and mingled with the local populations off the coast of New York, perhaps even replacing them at times.

Oh, wow. But I'm hesitant to call that a migration. It's more of just dispersal. And just for funsies, 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 scallops 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 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

for 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 argo pectiniradiens, so that's the base scallop. It wasn't an accidental invasion. It was introduced to China purposely, and in the 80s, I believe. I think that went over in the 1980s. Would you say that you have found like Slayer would like to know, do they have personalities? Slayer asks, 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 by-vow. I like you.

A few people had word questions. Nick A. Spexl and first time cross-dress girl, Julia Sheppard. 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 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's scallops? I don't know. I've never heard that.

And I was like, So in a 1981 article by the publication Yankee, they tried to settle this score, but it was published again on Newinglitter.com in 2022, because apparently this controversy has a longer lifespan They tried to settle this score, but it was published again on Newinglitter.com in 2022, because apparently this controversy has a longer lifespan than even a C-scallup in 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. They're inlanders. It's scallop. But you need not live in the briny air of New England to feel this way. Just ask the English. In America, you say Scala. We say Scalop. We need to get over it. Or at least Michael Wang on TikTok, who was launching into that dismissal while while chewing on a kick-cat that he had bitten through first without breaking, just like it was a chocolate sandwich

and not like a holy tradition of snapable bars. He was out to get goats, but speaking of representation. Have you ever seen a good movie, a good character that's a scallop? Are there any in children's cartoons? 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 scallop 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, Bose. I went on research gate, and I found Sam's master thesis.

I tracked on the co-authors, and I found her advisor, Dr. Amy Ringwood. Then I watched several YouTube videos of Dr. Ringwood interviewed in her lab to see if there was an errant poster or like a faded inkjet printout tacked the wall featuring baby scallops. Then I emailed Dr. Ringwood. Then I found an Instagram for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Marine Sciences program and I looked for photos of the facilities. Then I followed and messaged people who recently studied there. A few of them

were already following me. Hey, and I want you to know I had to pee during a lot of this research, but I was like a German shepherd with a tri-tip locked on this. And I got so desperate that I finally opened Twitter. And within 16 minutes after asking, a listener by the name of Ali Henkel, casually tweeted back, is it these little dudes from Alice in Wonderland? Ugh! Animated, mollusk babies snuggled into their shells and singing. This imagery is from the 1951 Disney movie Alice in Wonderland and it features these baby little bivalves being cautioned by their older mother

who points to an underwater calendar tuned to the month of March, urging her offspring to stay home lest they be devoured by this wily walrus. And they're like, later days mom, and they follow the walrus anyway to their own peril. I'm sure you can imagine how this ends. But this vignette is called the walrus and the carpenter or the story of the curious oysters. Oysters, the fuck. Okay, so I emailed Samantha the YouTube link and I asked, was this it? And I got a thrilling response right away.

She went, we're right back and said, oh my gosh, yes, that's amazing. You were able to track that down based off my terrible description. But I guess they were oysters after all. Although running across the sand bed, she says, is very un-oister-like and is the scallops claim to fame.

She concludes, and now we know that there is no maternal guidance. A mom might have two million babies via an orgy. She doesn't give a single shit what they're doing. This is a numbers game. Oh, what about that calendar? Why do oysters have a calendar underwater? Okay, so that was just a letters game. There's this long held adage used to be

to only eat shellfish in months with an R. Skip it, May, June, July and August. And a lot of experts are like, that advice predated things like refrigeration and ice machines and like the FDA. But yes, Samantha also said that she can now use that clip in her teaching and said, nothing like an ambiguous cartoon shellfish. They should be a scallop movie.

They should just make their 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, 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 got to 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 little slippery and you're trying to get it open, and you kind of get yourself with the scalpel instead. Slipper little suckers.

I do have a couple little scars on my hands from, I guess, poor, poor shucking procedures. You should wear gloves. For those who do partake, do you have any good shucking, got any good shucking advice? Yeah, just wear gloves and wear gloves are helpful and it's sharp knife, but definitely the gloves

because there shells do harbor a lot of bacteria, just like oysters. And if you do get cut, you wanna make sure you clean out the cut very well. Nobody wants fibrio. 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 U.S., this seawater bacteria causes

80,000 illnesses per year and there are many different strains of vibrio and several can cause foodborne illnesses, but another superstar in the vibrio genus has a little number we like to call cholera, but yes, these little saltwater vibriobuggers, they can give you all kinds of watery emissions from holes you don't expect it from. Let's just say if you have a cut also and you go in the ocean or you have a fresh tattoo, you could pick it up there. However, the vast majority of non-collar a vibrio infection from seafood just comes from eating it.

And the CDC says that most infections occur from May through October when water temperatures are warmer. Wait, those are the months, a lot of those are months with no hours. Oh dear. Okay, so maybe just take that into the count if you are eating or slinging back the sea creatures such as mushroom Morgan and Liz Perolter Reed who had questions about watching scallops get shocked, like straight from the water into the belly, Walmer style. Do you pop it where the shell meets the shell or is there a trick to it? 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 a doctor 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 need a lot of resources. There's nothing like an early morning low tide and you're the only one out Checking on your scallops or checking on you know, whatever you've got going on in the field and that that to me is really cool Does a lot of your work involve kind of like solitary

kayak field work out out in the water? 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 my 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 fieldwork 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 fisherman people had taken them thinking that they were crab traps. And I was encroaching on their turf, even though it wasn't catching 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 solitary kayak in the picture. What was that like that day that you discovered that? It was heartbreaking.

It was really heartbreaking and panic and do-seen and just all sorts of anxiety. Thankfully, I had two really great advisors for my PhD dissertation. They helped me very quickly. Pivot, get my my feedback underneath me and moving forward. So it was, 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 crap for sure. Oh, that should be like an inspirational poster. You're right. It's not as bad as having someone who thinks you're trying to steal their crab, steal your scallops. That's catchy. Did you learn anything about resilience through that at all? I mean, there are bus times and there are 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 found that we help each other out. If somebody's going out on a boat and your research site happens to be nearby or you need something collected, most people are more than happy to go ahead and pick up what you need while they're out to save you on that boat time or you know in my case I needed scallop babies and I didn't have the resources at the moment to spawn my own scallop babies and I had a couple of hatcheries provide those for me free of cost just in good good faith for research and things like that. It just really helpful. And I think the community is a strong one. And then of course, here we are talking

because of Bobby Corrigan. So, hey, help. I'm so glad I got to ask you all of this. I don't know if I'm gonna 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. This is so much fun. My first podcast is like a great one. I love it. So ask generous people, shellfish questions, because look at how much you can learn. And Dr. 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 Allegis on Twitter and Instagram. I'm an alleyward with 1L on both. And if you have kids or you know people to 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 to alleyward.com slash smologies.

Thank you Zee Grudwigis-Thomas and Mercedes-Mateland of Madeland Audio for working on those. Thank you, Aaron Talbert for admiting theology's podcast Facebook group with the system Shannon Feltis and Bunny Dutch. Emily White of the Wordery makes our transcripts. Susan Hale runs so much of the show including your merch orders at oligiesmurch.com we do have bathing suits we got bucket hats, toads, shirts and you can tag yourself in them with oligies merch and we'll repost you.

Noelle Delworth helps with that and schedules guests and my whole life Kelly our Dwyer tweaks the website Mark David Christensen and Jared Sleeper are instrumental editors, although I'm married to only one of them. And lead editor is one of the many Dr. Muscles that keeps the show together, Mercedes-Mateland of Madeleine.io. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music and if you stick around until the end of the show, I tell you a secret. And if you listened to the mega-oncore last week about fire ecology and indigenous fire ecology, there was a special secret at the end about some medication and some mental health stuff going on here with your friend Ali Ward, hence the need for that last minute on core. And thank you to

everyone who was so kind and sent sweet notes about my getting off of this medication. I've been on a fixer for years because I have wonky ovaries and it can help with hot flashes and mood stuff that comes from having wonky, unpredictable hormones. And don't get me wrong. Like such a good drug helps my anxiety so much, but I'm tweaking some things to try to tackle some ADHD stuff. And word of the wise, taper off, effects are slowly.

Do not think because say you came from a lineage of strong stoic farm people, you can just barrel your way through a rapid withdrawal or else you will cry a lot. Also hormones, people get your hormones checked. I have that ovarian failure. It happens to about 1% of people, so lucky early. And because my ovaries just hung a gone fish and sign, they pieced right out. I am receiving all kinds of gender, affirming care via hormones

from estrogen and progesterone so that the unopposed estrogen doesn't give me cancer. And then I found out after years of this, I have like no testosterone. And you need that. Everyone needs to have some of that, no matter what gender you are. So I have to put a testosterone cream on daily. And guess what? If you have ADHD without knowing it for a handful of decades, you might not remember to put that cream on every day. Anyway, I am tweaking some things and trying to take better care of myself because we all deserve it.

So I took a few days off and did some crafting, I glued some magnets to rocks and I got my molecules back in better balance with some of the right prescriptions. So thanks for the patience. That's what's been going on. I just, I love making the show so much and it's been 326 weeks in a row of being on deadline, except for a few handfuls when I was sick or bearing my dad and I would just like to keep doing it for as long as I can't.

I like to keep making the show, not being sick or bearing my dad. Also, happy Father's Day from From a dad you will always have, even though I'm a lady and I'm on the internet, but I hope the show gives you a little bit of what my dad gave me, which is curiosity for just all the wonders around you every day and all the cool people who get excited about things and will share that. And also just the knowledge that you're loved and you're lovable no matter how weird you are. You smart, fun little goblin. Okay, bye bye.

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