I love the busy coquina clams! I'd have said often they are able to burrow back down out of sight quickly, even before the next wave disturbs. Is it rare to see such dense aggregations exposed as in your video? Come to think of it, perhaps the very fact of how dense they were in that case resulted in them not being as able to dig down as they usually do in sand? Where I've seen them, they are much less dense and rarely if ever have I seen them exposed between waves; have to scoop up a handful of sand to see them contorting their foot!
Thanks for reading, Jim! Always good to have a real marine biologist stop by. I’ve seen them pretty densely packed but this was *by far* the most crowded i’d ever seen those clams. It was on a stretch of beach that’s closed for most of the summer for birds (although I would think that would put *downward* pressure on the clam populations, as birds congregated there and eat them). Maybe just something below that made it hard for them to move down? A deposit of old broken shells? The physics of that little world of liquefied sand is something I struggle to fully wrap my head around!
I love the busy coquina clams! I'd have said often they are able to burrow back down out of sight quickly, even before the next wave disturbs. Is it rare to see such dense aggregations exposed as in your video? Come to think of it, perhaps the very fact of how dense they were in that case resulted in them not being as able to dig down as they usually do in sand? Where I've seen them, they are much less dense and rarely if ever have I seen them exposed between waves; have to scoop up a handful of sand to see them contorting their foot!
Thanks for reading, Jim! Always good to have a real marine biologist stop by. I’ve seen them pretty densely packed but this was *by far* the most crowded i’d ever seen those clams. It was on a stretch of beach that’s closed for most of the summer for birds (although I would think that would put *downward* pressure on the clam populations, as birds congregated there and eat them). Maybe just something below that made it hard for them to move down? A deposit of old broken shells? The physics of that little world of liquefied sand is something I struggle to fully wrap my head around!