Reef Builders - The Source for Reef Keeping Information

Reef Ramblings: Clamming Around
Part II: Spawning Tridacnids
Adam Blundell M.S.

Introduction
In the previous article I covered the many reasons why hobbyists would be interested in keeping Tridacnid clams.To sum up that article, Tridacnids are a perfect animal for captive care. For the more advanced hobbyists, or at least the more adventurous hobbyists, Tridacnid clams are potentially wonderful animals to aquaculture, experiment, and study.

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Introduction

Giant Clams are amazing. Let me just start by saying that. The members of the family Tridacnidae are also known as the Tridacnids or as the Giant Clams. These animals are truly amazing. Within the phylum Mollusca there are about 115,000 species on Earth, with 30,000 of them contained in the Bivalvia class (Bivalves). Of those 30,000 bivalves a whopping 8 belong to the Family Tridacnidae. It is safe to say that in the grand scheme of things they are certainly oddities. That isn’t to say they are rare in numbers of individuals, just odd from an evolutionary standpoint.

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by Holle Abee

Think of all the divers who go to such lengths to visit saltwater reefs for a view of the amazing sea life that inhabits the area. Now imagine that you can have a little corner of that magic in your own home. With a saltwater reef tank, you can have the mezmerizing tranquility and the brilliant natural beauty of a tropical sea, all vividly displayed in an aquarium.

A reef tank isn’t just a regular saltwater aquarium. The key word is “reef.” The main focus of the tank is the soft or hard corals. Colorful fish, sea stars, eels, anemones, urchins, shrimp, and sea horses can certainly be added, but everything should revolve around the coral itself.

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Fishing, fertilizer runoff, pollution, shipping, climate change—these are just a few of the ways that human activities influence the oceans that cover 70 percent of Earth’s surface. And in all that vastness—139 million square miles (360 million square kilometers)—less than 4 percent remains unaffected, and more than a third has suffered serious human impacts, according to a new map published in Science.

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New research shows that the second most diverse group of hard corals first evolved in the deep sea, and not in shallow waters. Stylasterids, or lace corals, diversified in deep waters before launching at least three successful invasions of shallow water habitats in the past 30 million years. This finding contradicts a long-established theory that suggests corals and other marine animals all evolved in shallow water before migrating into deeper habitats.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released The State of Deep Coral Ecosystems of the United States, providing new insight into the complex and biologically rich habitats found in deeper waters off the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.

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NOAA is proposing to extend most of the prohibitions of the Endangered Species Act - normally applied only to endangered species - to the threatened elkhorn and staghorn corals.

NOAA biologists estimate more than 90 percent of elkhorn and staghorn corals have been lost because of coral bleaching due to rising sea temperatures, disease, and tropical storm damage. Both species were listed as threatened in May 2006.

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The January 08 edition of Reef Builders Magazine is online. In it Adam Blundell discusses the substrate cover in Fiji reefs. A very interesting article about what you will find at the reefs in Fiji.

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