"Disco Clam" Lights Up To Scare Predators Away 49
sciencehabit writes When predators get close, the bright, orange-lipped "disco clam" flashes them to scare them off. But it's not just the light that's important. Researchers have found that the clam has sulfur in its fleshy lips and tentacles and suspect that, like another clam species that drop tentacles laden with sulfuric acid to deter predators, the disco clam's sulfur also gets converted into a distasteful substance. The flashing may warn predators away, similar to the bright orange of a monarch butterfly warning birds of its toxic taste.
Re:Useless site (Score:5, Funny)
Why nowadays these useless sites require javascript to to display even the most basic content?
Yeah what's up with that. Why bother even using HTML? Can't they just fax me a copy of the content?
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Carrier pigeon? What's that? I'm still using Drums.
Drums?! Luxury...
I still use smoke signals. The bandwidth and error rate suck, but they handle the last kilometre better than drums.
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Smoke signals? You were lucky.
In my community, we haven't even developed recognisable language. We still communicate using grunting and facial expressions.
And yet you seem more eloquent than many posters on slashdot.
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Back in the mid 90's I was working for a small company that had a marketing director who, when he saw something on the "world wide web" that he thought would be useful to us, would actually print it out and fax it to us.
And then later he hired someone to make up some images for the web site. He called me up and asked what was the best way to get it to me? Which courier service? I said "Can't you email them?" "Oh no," he said. "I want
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Not surprising at the time. Email could be very very slow, a lot of people didn't know how to use it, and the messages could be lost. Then again, the inter-departmental memos routinely got lost as well.
In the 80s I once got notified of new mail and a few seconds after that I received a phone call asking if I had received the email. The funny thing was that the email was only a couple lines long and the phone call gave me all the details which made the email itself redundant.
And after all that effort to ge
Re:Useless site (Score:5, Insightful)
You snark ... but that page has 11 scripts from itself, 1 from assets.adobetm.com, 1 from brightcove, 1 from apis.google.com, 1 from ajax.google.com, and one from platform.twitter.com.
The amount of shit which comes in the form of Javascript is mind boggling .. let alone all of the web bugs and beacons for the assholes who run the analytics companies.
Basically they intentionally write their pages so they pretty much don't work unless you're allowing the other crap to run. So, yes, I think the GP has a perfectly valid point. You don't need javascript to display the basic text of your story or do your page layout.
It's just garbage written by lazy people who are beholden to advertising companies.
Fortunately, with enough plugins, you can block this crap
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I think there are two causes. First, it's clearly for advertising. No one makes products anymore when they can just make money advertising someone else's products intead. Every two bit blogger feels it's their divine right to make a profit off of their inane ramblings. Second, a lot of sites really don't have developers and instead they just borrow some premade frameworks from a third party, they may not even realize that they're serving up a lot of crap and bogging down the bandwidth.
Javascript is goin
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Dear Mr. Clam,
1995 used a dial-up modem from a landline to send an email requesting their <blink> tags back.
Sincerely,
2015
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At first, I thought this was about some chick I met way back in the 70's.....dangerous, flashing clam, I could have sworn they were talking about Loretta!!
Useless TITLE. (Score:2, Informative)
Title: "DISCO CLAM" Lights up to scare predators away!
Summary: It's not really the light that scares them away.
Hey, idiot editors! Would you please post a summary that has some consistency with the title?
Re:Useless TITLE. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe folks should read the content before commenting on it.
Blasphemy!
Re:Useless site (Score:4, Insightful)
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Agreed, here's a youtube video in case you trust them (probably not the same video though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9g56r5ZkWQ/ [youtube.com]
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I block Javascript, and everything except the video displays just fine.
Clickbait (Score:3, Funny)
Do we really need clickbait titles like "disco clam" on slashdot...
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I look forward to the article in Disco Ver magazine
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Never seen a disco clam. I do recall a few disco beavers, back in the day...
My guess is that Disco Clam is a character on Spongebob Squarepants.
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Never seen a disco clam. I do recall a few disco beavers, back in the day...
My guess is that Disco Clam is a character on Spongebob Squarepants.
Whoosh.
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Without them we would never know that sulphuric acid is unpleasant!
Obligatory Eve Online reference (Score:1)
Staying Alive (Score:3)
The article is about how the flashing acts as a defense mechanism against predatory shrimp.
Ah. Ah. Ah. Ha. Staying aliiiiiive!
Researchers? (Score:2)
The bright, orange-lipped âoedisco clamâ (Ctenoides ales) became a phenom last year when researchers learned that its dazzling display (see video above) proved to be reflections of ambient light and not light produced by the clams themselves.
I've been in the marine reef keeping hobby for several decades, though I haven't had a tank set up in some time. I've kept this species for many years. They are call "electric flame scallops" in the hobby. Even though they are clams and not scallops. But I have to wonder who these researchers are to have just discovered that they do not actually produce light. I've known for at least 20 years that these clams produce this effect by moving parts of their mantle to expose a bluish white streaks under the redd
Amazing similarities (Score:2)
Disco Stu disapproves... (Score:2)
Everyone knows it's a Disco DUCK, not a Disco Clam...
Unless it's a Disco Geoduck, I guess....
Disco would repel me (Score:2)
Heavily amused... (Score:2)
That the link to "The flashing" is a text document, and has no visuals of the clam, let alone of it flashing.