Giant Clams.

On the 28th of Febaury I went to Tai Mueng to help to put 300 giant clams into the small reef there. Why Giant clam? Besides their beauty, clams offer  benefits to the sea. Their ability to filter nutrients from the water. The colorful, fleshy part of Tridacna clams that is displayed when the shell is open is called the 'syphonal mantle. This mantle contains both an incurrent (intake) and an expelling orifice (opening). The clams use these openings to move water through their internal organs, where nutrients and plankton are filtered out and consumed by the clam.

Tridacna clams not only use nutrients from the water to satisfy their nutritional needs, but also employ algae cells called zooxanthellae within their mantle. These algae cells use nutrients from both the clam and the water, and along with light, they photosynthesize. The energy that these cells produce through photosynthesis is then returned back to the clam which uses this energy source to aid in its growth.

The nutrients that clams remove from the water are mainly ammonia and nitrate. When a clam feeds upon ammonia, it eliminates this nutrient from the system before it is processed by the biological filtration. The biological filtration is what facilitates the nitrogen cycle, and by not allowing ammonia to enter into this cycle, the end product nitrate will not be formed. This ultimately reduces the biological load and lowers the overall nitrate level.

Department of Fisheries and Coastal Fisheries Research and Development Bureau are doing a research about Giant Clams and have managed to breed 200,000 of them. Many organizations are helping to put the clams in the sea. To make the water more clean, have more oxygen and less potentially harmful phyto- and zooplankton.