::facepalm::
Really not much else to say.
What’s accidental about it?
Was there some other way than cracking open its shell that would have allowed them to know how old it was without killing it?
Because otherwise, I don’t blame those creaky clam killers.
I hope they at least made some chowder.
Well, I guess now that he’s cracked open, it should be pretty easy to do the autopsy.
Such a shame - he died so young. His great, great, great, great, great grandparents are going to be devastated when they hear the news.
It’s pretty much Schrodinger’s Clam, innit?
Charles Darwin was obsessed with eating as many animals as he could. If it’s dead I’d hope they’d try, at least to say that you ate 500 year old clam.
they didn’t clam up about it.
When they realized their mistake did they shut it quickly and try to Clamp it?
Typical. Doing more harm than good.
Oh Goddammit. Apparently, another example of crappy reporting. No intentional clam murder involved. Well this combines two media errors which are coming up distressingly common lately: reporters misreporting thing then not checking their facts (see: “testicle eating fish”), along with a news story that was reported 7 years ago and now has a small update, but it’s made to seem completely new. I don’t blame USA Today specifically (they seem to be clearer on the age of the original story), but I bet that the Daily Mail or someone was a main culprit.
Surely, at that age, it had quite a big beard.
As the article notes, this was almost certainly not the oldest clam in the world, just the oldest one whose age had been determined. Older ones might be being killed all the time just to make clam chowder.
The fact that they actually killed 200 clams is supposed to make it better, is it?
I get it’s a shame to end something that’s lived a profoundly long time. But it’s lived a long, full life. Of just kinda sitting there. At the bottom of the sea. For half a century. Bored out of its goddamn clam-mind.
Even for a clam, they probably did it a favor.
It’s a calamity of epic proportions.
No need to get oneself in a stew about it.
I’m reminded of a Far Side cartoon, in which a man is relating the centuries-long history of a giant sequoia, by reading the rings just after he’s sawed it down.
Correction: Half a millennium. But yeah, he was probably begging for death’s sweet embrace.
Well, strictly speaking, it’s clam-ganglia.