Category Archives: Clams

Top-Level category for posts related to clams

Making Tuva Files Available to Students

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In this post, we show you how to make a dataset that you uploaded to Tuva available to students for their own exploration and use. We will work with the Boothbay Harbor sea surface temperature (SST) dataset that we uploaded in an earlier “how to” post. We also illustrate a few of the many things you can do with Tuva, including “filtering” the data so that you only see a part of the data.  We will also show you how to change the range of the axes on a graph and how to save a particular graph for future use.…

Sumner Memorial High School student presenting findings at the Maine Fishermen's Forum, March 2018

The Shellfish Project Over the School Year

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The way that CSI-Maine fits into the school year strongly influenced by the clam lifecycle. Clams grow over the summer, which means that teachers and students set out their experiments in the spring and collect data in the fall. This is a nice fit to the school year in many ways. It provides an opportunity to get the new school year off to a strong start with a highly engaging outdoor activity and gives teachers and students the winter months to analyze data, prepare presentations to shellfish committees and others, and make plans for the next season’s work.…

European Green Crab

The Green Crab Lifecycle

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The European green crab (Carcinus maenas) arrived in the New York and New Jersey ports in the early 1800s, spread to Casco Bay by the 1890s, and continued to spread northward to Downeast Maine and the Bay of Fundy over the twentieth century (Fulton et al., 2013).  It is a voracious predator, but until recently the crab’s numbers in Maine were kept in check by cold winters. That was enough to make it possible for softshell clams to continue to thrive even though green crabs were eating them.…

Small clam being measured

The Clam Lifecycle

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There are many reasons that it will be useful for students to have an understanding of the softshell clam (Mya arenaria) life cycle as they work as part of CSI-Maine. It will help them understand when clams are most vulnerable to predators, how long it takes for a clam to reach legal size, why there can be lots of seed clams even in areas where there are no adult clams, and much more. Understanding the clam lifecycle will also be important for using CSI-Maine in support of learning goals related to ecological concepts such as predator/prey relationships and population dynamics. …