Our world, my oyster

Even before/I decide which to take,/which to twist from the wet rocks,/which to devour,/they, who have no eyes to see with,/see me, like a shadow,/bending forward.” – Mary Oliver, "Mussels", 1979

For the sake of transparency, I feel compelled to state that I originally intended to write about how the Trumpled state of things recently got personal – his funding freeze last Wednesday postponed if not killed a three-month-long writing project we were counting on – but then last night at a newly French friend’s fête de nationalité I had a couple of three or four glasses of post-Dry January wine on an empty stomach, which temporarily altered my view of the world to such a degree that, now, here, I find myself writing instead about molluscs – bivalves, to be precise, not snails or slugs or siphon-spitting inkfish like the giant squid or the aggressive Humboldt squid or even the greater blue-ringed octopus, which contains enough neurotoxin to kill 10 adult humans and which, collectively, are believed to have caused 7 to 16 human deaths, though most scholars agree that there have been at least 11, the first being at East Point, Darwin, Australia, in 1954 – the first to be documented, that is – however, that octopus was not correctly identified until 1964, the same year that the Medical Journal of Australia published an article by D.G. Hopkins, M.B., B.S. entitled “Venomous Effects and Treatment of Octopus Bite” about a near-fateful greater blue-ringed octopus biting that reportedly occured at 8.15 p.m. on Christmas Eve in Cowes, a seaside resort in southern Victoria, Australia to a “well-built male schoolteacher, aged 21 years” who remained mentally lucid and conscious throughout his 12-hour paralysis, which he described as proceeding through the following steps, in the order mentioned: (i) a loss of feeling around his mouth; (ii) a loss of sensation in the back of his head and neck; (iii) trouble breathing - he initially felt his tongue was swollen, making it difficult to get enough air; (iv) a feeling of chest immobility; (v) weakness and an inability to move or control his limbs; (vi) after some time, he regained the ability to move his eyes – their movement was the last to be lost and the first to return; (vii) a “burning feeling” on his skin when touched, while all the while hearing everything that was said around him, particularly with regard to his prognosis, including, for example, the devastating statement “it looks as if this chap has had it”.

No envenomating variety, then, from bite nor sting, will be here further addressed, nor, finally, it appears, will there be much addressment of the shelled variety, except to mention in passing, like shallow water over river mud, the three mussel species classified on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's red list as the rarest and most endangered – the thick-skinned mussel (Unio crassus), the river mussel (Ptomida litoralis) and the depressed or compressed anodonta mussel (Pseudanodonta complanata) – which were discovered last month in bonus salus in the Seine, in the murked depths off Ile Saint-Louis, bringing the total number of mussel species in the river to 20 and bivalve species to, it is believed, 47, 5 of which are non-native and therefore invasive, much like the 37 non-native fish species that the Seine is said to contain, which include those humanly introduced from the 13th century till now for:

• zootechnical concerns, as is the case of the common carp, the bighead carp, and the grass carp;

• fish-farming objectives, such as a number of “exotic” surgeons;

• by anglers, as is the case for the pikeperch, the grayling and the European catfish;

• or unintentionally, such as the unwanted eastern mudminnow, stone moroko, ruffe, nase, round goby and tubenose goby.

Instead, for reasons that escape me, I will discuss my hangover. Or at least focus all of my attention on it. But first. Did you know that all octopuses have venom and that, on average, four new non-native species of fish or shellfish are introduced into the Seine every decade, and that this is now accelerating, an immediate outcome of the globalised movement of people and goods coupled with the human alteration of natural habitats, and new fish species have recently reached the Seine basin, and others are now present on the neighbouring Rhine and Maas catchments, and that the Amur sleeper (Perccottus glenii) is in full expanding phase in Eastern and Central Europe and will most certainly also arrive quite soon? More to my point, the once most-common population of the above-mentioned thick-skinned mussel was decimated for pearl buttons in the late 1800s, and the river mussel (Ptomida litoralis), the most abundant freshwater bivalve of Europe until the mid-point of the 20th century, was harvested into imperilment near villages along the Seine for use as pig and chicken feed? And – this is the kicker – like all freshwater mussels, and unlike their marine varieties, thick-shelled river mussels (Unio crassus) have a parasitic stage, during which its larvae, known as glochidia, are released by females in spit packets of about 1,000 each. The larvae in the packets attach to and infect the gills and fins of certain types of fish, mainly minnows and chub, and they stay there till they have developed, at which time they detach and float to the bottom of the river.

My point? In another month or so female thick-shelled river mussels will begin slowly moving along the bottom of the Seine by repeatedly extending their feet out of their shells, anchoring them to the river floor and pushing and pulling them until they reach the river’s edge; and then, with their back ends raised above the waterline, making them easy prey – they will start glochidial spurting for three to six hours, by which I mean they will deliberately and streneously squirt out jets of glochidial-laden water that, by landing in the water a full metre away, will disturb the river's surface and attract fish. The mussel larvae within the jets will then attach themselves to the fish's gills and fins, and slowly transform into adult mussels.

Is not all life like this? Let us think on this, and stop feeling sorry for ourselves, and take ourselves out into the sun, which has been absent since mid-November, and meet our friends for oysters, and wash those oysters down with cold Muscadet. Then, when we return, let us discuss bivalvian pain in the comments, and the 6,000 neurons in a clam versus the 250,000 neurons in an ant, and how plant agriculture kills animals with central nervous systems, and why you should take advantage of my special offer on paid subscriptions. Until then, heed these briny stanzas of Seamus Heaney:

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south of Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

– Seamus Heaney, “Oysters” Field Work, 1979

And this, from a letter René Descartes wrote on 23 November 1646 to the Marquis of Newcastle:

I know full well that animals do many things better than us, but I am not surprised by this because it serves to prove that they act naturally and by mechanisms, just like a clock, which shows the time much better than our judgment teaches us. And without a doubt, when the swallows come in spring, they act like clocks. Everything that bees do is of the same nature, and the order that cranes keep while flying and that monkeys observe while fighting, if it is true that they observe any order, and finally the instinct to bury their dead, is no stranger than that of dogs and cats, who scratch the earth to bury their excrement, even though they almost never bury it: this shows that they do it only by instinct and without thinking. One can only say that, although animals do not perform any action that assures us they think, nonetheless, because the organs of their bodies are not very different from ours, one can conjecture that there is some thought connected to these organs, as we experience in ourselves, although theirs is much less perfect. To this, I have nothing to reply except that if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul as well as we do, which is not likely, because there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and there are several too imperfect to believe that of them, such as oysters, sponges, etc.

On second thought, let’s stop here. I am presenting symptoms iii), iv) and vi) from the 1961 Crowes list. It is time to take decisive action. Have a great week. I love you all.