p. 10 | CLAMS THAT TRAP MEN

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 19, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 46.

CLAMS THAT TRAP MEN.

BIVALVES of various species form traps of a deadly character, and of these the various clams are most frequently heard of. The Sun told the other day, of a rat whose tail was caught by a clam over in Hoboken.

Darwin's theory on the broadcast distribution of species was that the birds carried them. For instance, a heron wading on the spawning bed of a trout gets a number of the eggs stuck to its legs. On flying to a stream some miles away, hitherto unstocked with this kind of fish, the eggs are washed off and are hatched according to the regular course of nature. The fish breed and multiply.

A Canada goose killed in Ohio, had a freshwater clam attached to one mid-toe. Had the goose not been killed the clam would have dropped off in water perhaps hundreds of miles from its original home.

The Sun of April 19 told of a gull which was nearly drowned by a clam which had closed on its bill in a Massachusetts bay. Similar stories are told of other birds.

Men have stepped into the open jaws of huge clams accidentally at low tide, and the clams, closing their jaws, have held them fast till the tide rose, when the men were drowned. Other men have reached for a lure in the form of a luminous spot. The instant they touched it the shells of a clam closed on their arms, and in a few minutes the men were drowned. Some of the clams that trap men are found embedded in the coral reefs of the Pacific and Indian oceans, and the men captured are pearl-divers. The flesh of one of the huge clams sometimes weighs twenty pounds, and added to that is the 500 pounds or more of shell. The shell is something like five feet long by two and three-quarters wide. Poets are fond of saying that these shells are the cradles of sea goddesses, since they are very beautiful if polished. They are also used as baptismal fonts.—New York Sun.