Clam troubles

[Delphinus]

You'll need a strong stomach. I do this for all my clams that I remove but you need to be a biologist or pathologist to really understand what you're seeing.

Greg I do sympathize but you are jumping to the wrong conclusion. Bristle worms (and for pity's sake, EVERYONE - PLEASE STOP CALLING THEM BRISTOL WORMS, for crying out loud! Geez! Sorry I just can't take it anymore!! BRISTLE WORMS!!! As in, the bristles like that on a broom. Bristol is a city in England!!) are scavengers.

Any scavenger will move in and possibly deal the final blow to a dieing animal. But does that make them the cause of death?

I'm sorry but I'm compelled to share one key learning in almost 15 years of keeping tridacnid clams: they don't turn around once past a point. They simply don't have the auto-immune response that other organisms might have. If you or I were tired or distressed and our immune response was compromised, we'd probably get the sniffles or a head cold. A clam on the other hand ... well that's just basically it. They CAN turnaround from some things but for the most part by the time you have realized something is amiss, it's usually well past the point of no return.

I don't mean to be mean here but you have to consider a few things. 1) You've added a lot of clams in the past 6 to 12 months from many different sources. If a pathogenic agent was introduced along the way there is no way to trace it back conclusively. 2) As I've stated MANY times before .... clam ailments are HUGELY contagious. I feel like a broken record but I'll say it again. Clam ailments are HUGELY contagious! All it takes is one clam that is compromised and your entire stock is at risk. It could have been something that affected one clam 6 to 8 months ago and the recent losses are simply the cascading-forward effects from that. 3) Clams are also hugely sensitive to, well, everything. Temperature, pH, Ca, Alk, heck even Mg levels, if any of these are not rock solid stable the clams are among the first to show it. Simply moving from one tank to another can be enough to kill them.

My point being basically that longevity of clams is dependent hugely on luck. It sucks but it's the reality. Sometimes a clam just dies. Every few years the clustering of clam deaths causes this kind of thread on the board because it's just human nature to want to pinpoint a single cause that we can all blame but the reality is it's probably a combination of rotten luck, coincidence, and the fact that we hobbyists don't tend to employ the strictest of cross-contamination-protocols.