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"Disco Clam" Lights Up To Scare Predators Away
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.
Do we really need clickbait titles like "disco clam" on slashdot...
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?
Hopefully they'll send me a telegram.
Dear Mr. Clam,
1995 used a dial-up modem from a landline to send an email requesting their <blink> tags back.
Sincerely,
2015
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?
Because by forcing you to enable JavaScript to view their content they get more options for trying to serve you some ads and tracking you as well? If there's not an obvious "print view" or some other workaround I generally respond by just voting with my feet and closing the tab because I'm not going to be enabling JavaScript on a random site unless it's for content I *really* want to see. I suppose you could also get pissy about it because it's highly unlikely that such sites would comply with things like disability legislation requirements for screen reader compatibility and the like, but that's too much effort for me.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Agreed, here's a youtube video in case you trust them (probably not the same video though): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9g56r5ZkWQ/
This is not the sig you're looking for.
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 to make sure you get them."
I block Javascript, and everything except the video displays just fine.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Telegram? What's that? I'm still using the carrier pigeon.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
If I wanted to see a disco ball, I'd go get smartbombed by Rooks vs Kings.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
The article is about how the flashing acts as a defense mechanism against predatory shrimp.
Ah. Ah. Ah. Ha. Staying aliiiiiive!
Gently reply
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
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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 reddish-orange part.
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!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The similarities between humans and nature are amazing sometimes. I too would generally avoid any disco-related flashing things due to their 'poor taste.'
Everyone knows it's a Disco DUCK, not a Disco Clam...
Unless it's a Disco Geoduck, I guess....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If I was a predator and a clam lights up with those horrible 1970s fashions of bright clashing colors of polyester material, yuck that would turn me off very quickly.
mfwright@batnet.com
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.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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 get people to use the email on the network, today email seems to be considered out of fashion and only for old luddites.
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 going to be this decade's jobs program, pointless work designed to keep people off the streets.
That the link to "The flashing" is a text document, and has no visuals of the clam, let alone of it flashing.
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.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.