The common blenny is an inshore fish that can spend brief periods out of the water, where it waits to surprise unsuspecting scientists.
This article is delightful.
I clicked through to the video in the last paragraph about ancient clam gardens. The events of The Irish Potato Famine[1] have been on my mind in recent weeks and I don't really know where to go with this thought rattling around in my head. But I've been thinking that if the Irish had somehow supported clam digging for families in crisis due to the Potato Famine such that they didn't eat them raw and end up sick, that could have gone differently.
So it's interesting to see that clam gardens are being restored in my neck of the woods and that provides potential local food security to hedge against supply chain issues and other stresses in the world today.[2]
Oysters are also currently being restored in New York. They had largely disappeared and one of the reasons was over-consumption; at one point there were a billion oysters being harvested per year. The current goal is to just get back to one billion at all. https://untappedcities.com/2022/08/04/history-new-york-oyste...
The problem was that until recent decades, New York harbor was so full of pollution it was overwhelming the oysters. (19 million people's worth of sewage and runoff is a lot.)
A couple of large investments into waste treatment plants and now it is slowly getting back on its feet.
The Irish genocide happened because the British took their food and only left them with potatoes, which were suffering from a fungal disease. What makes you think the Empire would have let them keep their clams?
Ireland was very much an agrarian place at the time, with very little manufacturing or heavy industry. I'm not at all sure there would have been support for industrial-scale canning.
Both of which are in the middle of England which would have involved shipping shellfish to England before the invention of refrigeration. Oceanic travel on the fastest steam powered passenger vessels of the time maxed out at 13 knots or approximately 15 mph. Cargo ships are going to be slower many will be using sail so closer to 6 knots. Dublin to to Liverpool is about 191 miles by sea. So 31 hours away just counting transit how long are these warm clams good for?
Was it warm in the North Atlantic in the 1840s winters? Shellfish will keep for a few days to a week at refrigeration temperatures, 31 hours seems feasible at least several months a year in this hypothetical scenario.
This article is delightful.
I clicked through to the video in the last paragraph about ancient clam gardens. The events of The Irish Potato Famine[1] have been on my mind in recent weeks and I don't really know where to go with this thought rattling around in my head. But I've been thinking that if the Irish had somehow supported clam digging for families in crisis due to the Potato Famine such that they didn't eat them raw and end up sick, that could have gone differently.
So it's interesting to see that clam gardens are being restored in my neck of the woods and that provides potential local food security to hedge against supply chain issues and other stresses in the world today.[2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36690467
[2] https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/climate-resilience-and...