REUSE PLASTICS : THESE IDEAS ARE GOOD BUT YOU MAY NEED SUPERVISION!

I like the sock storage idea!  They're all interesting!

ENDANGERED SPECIES INTERNATIONAL on THE GIANT CLAM

ENDANGERED SPECIES INTERNATIONAL on GIANT CLAMS 

Excerpt: Giant clams are facing important threats from coral reef degradation and destruction, harvesting by coastal and island communities, and the sale and export of wild and dead specimens for the illegal aquarium trade and ornamental shell trade.  Further, giant clams are one of Buddhism's "seven treasures" along with gold. China's new rich with no conscience and awareness prize their big shells as showy ornaments.  Each can cost as much as $3000...

TAMPA BAY SCALLOP and MANATEES ENDANGERED - TAMPA BAY WATCH

Cynthia Barnett in THE SOUND OF THE SEA writes about what's been happening in Tampa, Florida, where the Tampa Bay Scallop has been the symbol of the city as well as the popular shell that tourists buy.

Excerpt page 257:  Where singling algal mats covered the surface of Tampa Bay in the 1970's, sunlight now streaks through clear water across more than 40,000 acres of sea grass.  Manatees have returned with turtles and fishes; the shuttered Tampa Tarpon Tournament is back on.

The turnaround began with touch sewage regulations: Tampa and other cities could no long dump barely treated waste into the bay. Nearby power plants stopped burning coal to cut nitro germ pollution carried from air to water. Programs for farmers and landscapers pared fertilizer runoff.  The Tampa Bay Estuary Program rallied citizens, business people, NGOPs, and government around more than five hundred projects over three decades to restore the region's liquid heart.

None of it has been enough for the Bay Scallop.  State fish and wildlife officials shuttered Florida's harvest in all but the Big Bend while scientists spent year's growing millions of larvae in hatchilings and transferring them to waters where scallops once thrived.  In Tampa Bay and P8ine Island Sound, numbers of zigzagging scallops would dramatically increase following each round.  Then, after a few generations in the wild, the populations would again collapse.

CONCH

 

THE SOUND OF THE SEA - INTERVIEW CYNTHIA BARNETT and MARINE MOLLUSKS

Cynthia Barnett, an environmental journalist, who has written two books about fresh water, and one about rain.  The book Sound of the Sea is about the oceans.  Many people do not know that a sea shell is made by a living animal and are not rocks or stones. We love the shells for their beauty but don't know about the creatures that make them and live in them.

Beaches are sometimes covered with the living shelled animals crawling on the sand. 

She will show you where the animal was with the shell when it was born.

A SEA SHELL IS MADE BY A LIVING ANIMAL

 

ARE SCALLOPS ENDANGERED? YES and NO!

The term Scallop can refer to any bivalve, however, when it comes to scallops as endangered, it depends on which kind of scallop.  The Great Scallop found around the coasts of Great Britain is endangered. Shells build from calcium in the water.  Acidic water harms that process.  The seas are significantly more acidic then they were a hundred years ago.  So the shells are having difficulty making their shells.  The ocean is also absorbing most of the extra heat and the water temperature is harming the sea creatures.

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ESA JOURNAL LIBRARY - HOW MANY SCALLOPS ARE THERE ANS WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Excerpt:  Scallops (Order Pectinida) have had a tumultuous existence over the past 245 million years, bearing witness to numerous transformations in ocean conditions and surviving two mass extinctions...

SWIMMING SCALLOPS - NOT JUST SHELLS

SOUND OF THE SEA by CYNTHIA BARNETT

SOUND OF THE SEA is such an interesting book, if there is only one you're going to take to the beach to read, this one should be it. Mollusks are the 'liver of our rivers" cleaning the water they are in, but plastics and pesticides are found in them.  They have ingested plastic micro particles and plastic fibers are also chocking other forms of sea life.

 

We think of clams as common but they are almost extinct in some places in this earth's waters.

The oceans are also absorbing more heat.  Where the water is too warm for them, mollusks are dying out.  Carbon Dioxide in the sea water has made sea water 30% more acidic than it was at the start of the industrial era.  Ocean acidification makes it difficult for the creatures who depend upon the shells they make to protect their bodies to create thick enough shells.  Thin and pitted shells make them more vulnerable.

SO THE NUMBER ONE THING YOU CAN DO AS A CITIZEN IS TO PICK UP AFTER YOURSELF, PUT PLASTICS IN RECYLCLING BINS, DON'T LEAVE ANYTHING IN THE SAND BECAUSE IT WILL PROBABLY END UP IN THE OCEAN/

THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO AS A CITIZEN IS TO NOT BUY SEA SHELLS - NOT FOR DISPLAY, NOT AS NECKLACES, NOT DECORATING THINGS.

PERFIDIA : THE VENTURES

THREE TYPES OF OYSTERS

 

MOLLUSKS ARE BEING KILLED OFF BY CLIMATE CHANGE - OCEAN TEMPERATURES - AND OVER HARVESTING

VOX: COLLECTING MOLLUSKS and CLIMATE CHANGE 

Excerpt: Shells also reveal a frightening future that climate change is swiftly ushering in.  "The sea and its life are taking a far greater blow than those of us on land," she writes.  Oceans are absorbing far more heat than land and they're becoming more acidic, as they suck up much of the carbon dioxide we emit into the air.  That's taking a toll on many mollusks, she writes, as is over-harvesting.

Referencing a book by Cynthia Barnett called Sound of the Sea