Shell DayShell Day

"An hourly guide that follows twenty-four mollusks to reveal the fascinating lives behind the shells. From morning to night and from the Arctic to the equator, snails, clams, and other shell-making mollusks have busy days. In this short book, award-winning author and marine biologist Helen Scales shows readers exactly how these animals spend their time. Far in the north, the Svalbard archipelago lies deep in the darkness of the polar night. And yet, in what remains a scientific mystery, Iceland scallops continue daily rhythms, closing and opening their fan-shaped shells using an internal clock. By nine in the morning, the sun penetrates the waters of a coral reef in the Philippines, where a giant clam slowly opens twinned shells. A fleshy mantle sticks out like a crimped smile, painted in swipes of lipstick in shades of turquoise, cobalt, and violet. These dazzling colors are not there to impress other clams. They're a by-product of a super-efficient system for harnessing food that allows them to become the biggest living bivalves. At noon, a clam shell sits still on the seabed in a sandy lagoon. The two shells open a crack, and a pair of rounded eyes peep out. A small, rust-colored coconut octopus hiding inside lets the clam shells fall apart and gathers them up in her arms. This mollusk's ancestors long lost the ability to produce their own shells, but she's happy to use another animal's cast off as a temporary home. At ten that night, a male moon snail is using his huge, fleshy foot like a plow as he digs down into the seabed in search of food. When the moon snail finds a cockle, he swiftly smothers it in his foot, then sets about drilling aided by a daub of acidic slime. Cockles are tasty, but so are other moon snails and his snacking has a cannibalistic flavor. For each chapter, illustrator and cartoonist Aaron John Gregory has depicted these scenes with entrancing pen-and-ink illustrations"-- Provided by publisher.