It's a pretty cheap sensor that can potentially detect all sorts of toxins in the water as a supplement to normal water quality analysis. You really can't expect any sort of reasonable sensor technologies to detect wide ranges of potentially harmful contaminants in water supplies while you can use mussels, clams, etc. as biological sensors--the modern "canary in a coal mine."
I worked with a research project that was sensing, collecting and analyzing types of mussels in rivers that were used as an indirect measurement of water quality in the river. The assumption is that the mussels can act as a proxy for certain contaminants. In fact, they actually filter a lot of water daily so you can occasionally analyze one as to what sort of contaminants it absorbed as a proxy for whats probably in the water.
Meanwhile, water intakes typically only monitor for known and suspected contaminants. They have to rely on other indirect measurements like changes conductivity as a signal to analyze the water and these are noisy and fairly unreliable compositional change detection proxies.
>Mussels open the shells and every now and then take in a small amount of water, filtering out everything that is suitable for eating. When the water is polluted, they do their best to separate from it, and everyone’s shells just close at the same time. This happens within two minutes. If two or three clams close, it doesn’t have to mean anything, but if there are eight, it’s an alarm. Then our role is to find out what has upset them so much and find out if it is a real or a false alarm – says Podolski.
So, slightly different but here's a nice video from Steve Mould about hepatitis being spread around the world by freshwater mussels, which were contaminated when storm drains overflowed into a river, taking sewer effluent with them.
You can do image analysis to count the shellfish in the image, and attach an “open” or “closed” status to each. Once you have a reliable field of Boolean values, you can detect anomalies in the close count.
You could then have a grid of tanks with inlets from the clean water supply and outlets to the sewer where you monitored (more or less real time) the reaction to our clean water supply.
For those who love eating clams and just like myself wonder how safe it is to eat clams, while they filter huge amount of water -- yes, it would be like eating a used filter, that's why clams that you get in restaurants must be grown in very clean water [1].
People have been eating used filters for millions of years. In particular, just 60 years ago you could find small clams almost in any beach and we believe homo erectus ate those.
But just less than 80 years ago, rivers started carrying all kind of new chemical compounds, like mines' waste, from coal cleaning particles to mercury and cadmium compounds.
Then we added other chemicals like detergents, or machine oils, or silver halides from photography, plastifiers and plastic or resins synthesis residues, Hormones like "the pill", fertilizers, heavy metals like Pb, industrial acids, pharmaceutical residues and I could go on and on.
In some places like in the Mediterranean sea clams just have been dissolved by acid waters or pollution just killed most of them.
This is specially true in the river mouth of big industrial rivers.
It is not lack of rationality, quite the contrary, people with information,like those that do quality analysis of waters will never eat things like fish coming out of some of them.
I don't know if it's rational or not, especially since I'm sure there are plenty of microplastics and pollutants in everything else, but I've completely removed filters & anything whole like shrimp from my diet.
I enjoy shrimp and scallops, but honestly I feel like given my current knowledge it's not worth it. Maybe we'll find out that all the microplastics in the ocean are totally fine, but better safe than sorry in my opinion.
Generally foreign contaminants introduce chronic immune responses. A rise in autoimmune disorders could potentially be a result. Or perhaps a single particle has a small chance of inducing cancer in a cell that endocytically engulfs it. In a situation like these the effects of low numbers will be small and hard to attribute to the source but that doesn’t mean it won’t continue to make it much worse for us.
That’s why I mentioned I’m sure they are everywhere, so maybe I’m overcautious.
At the same time though I’m certain any marine life is subjected to way more micro plastics than those on land. So consuming anything that functions as a filter is gonna have high concentrations of it. At least that is my logic.
That is to let them spit their sand out, and it only takes about 20 minutes.
If you want to let them spit overnight, you should put them into salt water, fresh water will kill them.
Most shellfish for consumption are farmed, and it's really important that they're grown in clean water to taste good, especially if the intent is to eat them raw.
Maybe they could have alerted about the lead contaminated water in Flint Michigan? A disaster that will affect the next generation. Lead Lowers IQ's in Children and increase crime rate in adults.
BTW, the invasive Zebra mussels have done a great job clearing up the Great Lakes. At times the water is so clear on a sunny day in the summer it can look tropical blue.
The water wasn't contaminated with lead, the pipes were. The people of Flint were under emergency management appointed by the governor, rather than local elected officials. The emergency managers switched municipal water supplies to save money. They also failed to treat the water to prevent the leaching of the lead into the drinking to save $140 a day. The water was contaminated with Legionella also, though, and that killed a dozen people. It was so bad local manufacturers had to get emergency waivers to switch back to the old water because it was corroding metal parts.
People knew about lead in people’s pipes in Flint. They stopped buffering the water to save money, which leached lead out of pipes in people’s houses. It was a politically engineered disaster.
And/or the supply lines running from the mains to the houses (which you wouldn't be able to look at the pipes in the house and see).
But the contamination happening in the pipes, near the taps, would limit the usefulness of this sort of monitoring (you'd have to do it at each customer location).
The water being crystal clear looks cool, but it's an ecological disaster for larger fish in the food chain that depend on the turbidity of the water for ambushing smaller fish.
wrong. The great lakes has been an ecological experiment since the St. Lawrence seaway was opened and continued to be that when the Chicago river was reversed.
There are almost no "native" species left in any of the lakes (excluding superior).
If you want sustainable native great lakes ecology you need to cut them off from the oceans, re-reverse the flow of the Chicago and do a one-off massive trout and other native fish stocking. None of that is ever going to happen so until then we can keep experimenting with ecology and in that case Zebra muscles is much better than massive population booms and busts of alewives or other invasive fish species (Salmon were originally introduced to help keep the alewife population down)
It’s true it’s been an experiment since the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened, but there are plenty of native species left in the Great Lakes.
This includes everything from walleye, lake trout, and perch all the way down to daphnia and diatoms.
The problems for native species in the Great Lakes has been driven by the introduction of zebra mussels, quagga mussels, the round goby, and spiny water flea (bythotrephes) for native food sources.
These new species have interrupted the food chain and therefore the reproductive fitness for many native species which further decimates the natural Great Lakes ecosystem.
Walleye are native and have been one of the hardest-hit by the loss of turbidity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walleye also Perch, Pike and a bunch of other species.. and I never fished for them but I know there are healthy populations of trout in the western Great Lakes, too.
Thats probably True. But to what extent will nature mitigate this, and offset the negative with positives. For example:
1) Clearer water means that light reaches deeper. Potentially allowing more aquatic plants to grow over huge new areas. Providing new habitat, food sources and shelter for fish.
2) Zebra mussels might trap some chemicals like PCBs. And accumulate them in their shells. Once the mussel dies, they fall to the bottom, and might permanently lock up them up into the sediment.
Eventually, sure. Not on human timescales, though. The new habitat is for species that don’t exist in that lake (since it’s full of fish adapted to how it was).
Crystal clear water also means that there is a scarcity of nutrients, otherwise algae would grow.
But this isn't necessarily a desaster, not all lakes are equal in their conditions for various species. This might just be what the lakes looked like for the longest time.
Btw., there are large fish hunting smaller ones in clear water. Most extreme example are sharks.
Most freshwater species are "ambush predators". Edges, shadows, eddies, etc. That's why those things are generally more productive fishing spots. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that even larger shark species tend to hunt around edges like thermoclines.
Mentioned in the comment below, but a few places are implementing it including New York City, South Carolina, and the Northern European Sea just from a quick YouTube search:
I also know of a couple projects in my area, near Poole and Christchurch harbours in the South of England, that have successfully reintroduced oyster beds in areas which were previously barren.
I wonder if clams could be composed to make a Turing-complete clam computer. It looks like this kind of behavior is sufficiently deterministic to be programmable.
If the water quality is normal, the clams open and close randomly.
If all 8 clams close, something is off with the water and prompts more investigation.
They get the clams from a nearby lake, and somewhat comfortingly, they retire them back to the lake when they've done a tour of duty. They're even marked so they don't reuse the same clams!
Nice to hear that they don't just euthanize them even if they are just clams. Guess I'm getting soft in my old age
It's not a sign of softness that you take a (minimal) effort to save a lifeform (that was useful to you). It's basic humanity, for lack of a better term (animality?).
I'd love to see what that leads to on an evolutionary timescale. Water departments of the future just go from clam bed to clam bed delivering treats and collecting water quality reports.
Interesting it is that our civilization is becoming more sensitive to smaller perturbations the larger it gets and the better information flow it achieves
From the article: 24 at a time, for a duty cycle of 3 months.
> We have three measuring devices in the company and eight clams in each. In total, we “employ” 200 individuals during the year.
This other article[1] says they get them from a lake, and are returned to the same lake after three months. They are marked so the scientists won’t pick up the same clam twice.
This is an odd form of cross species slavery. It’s one thing to agree to the conditions and another to force it upon life.
This... has a lot to contemplate. Service dogs don’t agree but there is an essence of joy there. Can you feel a clams emotions? I guess at this point you get close to the contemplation of plant life.
There’s one thing to kill life and use it for food and then another to use it as a test for poison. There’s probably more nuances. I’m not taking a stance that any of these things are wrong. I am however trying to make sense of the consequences of these pieces of the architecture of life that we participate in.
How can we define what "capable of consciousness" is? As we become a species closer to exploring the vast cosmos, we have to be humble in our assumptions of what consciousness or life is. It's quite a Copernicus error to think that humanity is the center of relative consciousness to compare against. What consciousness is may be entirely incommensurable - which would be a serious error in our discovery of what else exists in the universe.
There's a lot of wisdom in Star Trek: TNG, and it feels more prudent than ever to contemplate these lessons as we near the point of becoming space faring species.
I worked with a research project that was sensing, collecting and analyzing types of mussels in rivers that were used as an indirect measurement of water quality in the river. The assumption is that the mussels can act as a proxy for certain contaminants. In fact, they actually filter a lot of water daily so you can occasionally analyze one as to what sort of contaminants it absorbed as a proxy for whats probably in the water.
Meanwhile, water intakes typically only monitor for known and suspected contaminants. They have to rely on other indirect measurements like changes conductivity as a signal to analyze the water and these are noisy and fairly unreliable compositional change detection proxies.
Neat stuff.