I like oysters and clams-but they are getting very expensive. it seems to me that a large part of a shellfish’s life is spent constructing its hard calcium carbonate shell. If you could genetically modify them, could you have a animal that develops without a shell? This would speed the growth cycle quite a bit; plus you could grow them in tanks (controlled enviroment, no predators). has anyone tried this?
No need to do the engineering yourself. Nature’s already taken care of it.
Those are nothing like clams or oysters. I sincerely hope you are being willfully obtuse comparing a cephalopod to a clam.
Yes, but squid is tasteless-clams and oysters have real flavor.
If they are like snails, so do slugs, but I’m not sure anyone has tried to make escargot of them.
Comparison among different modern mollusca is somehow invalid? Well, I’m not going to try to get inside your head to see why you think they’re so different.
If you’re arguing taste, that’s a different thread for a purely opinion-based forum.
Growing shell fish in a controlled environment is a lot more complex than you think. Know some guys who do this for a living.
btw…who supplies the money for all this investment of genetic research so you can have a cheap supply of inexpensive savory delight ?
The cephalopod/clam comparison may be more apt than you think.
Living organisms are complex systems - they aren’t just an assemblage of parts. Even if you could create an oyster without a shell, there’s no reason to believe it would still taste like an oyster. Who knows, it may be that some part of the shell creating mechanism that gives oysters their distinctive taste.
Maybe your oyster without a shell would taste exactly like squid.
Moderator Note
Let’s not take personal jabs at other posters (especially when the post is appropriate, since cephalopods and clams are both mollusks).
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Ok.
More precisely, clams and oysters have a specialised powerful muscle that helps them clamp shut their shell. This muscle is part of what we eat and how they also open and shut to filter food, giving them their distinctive filter feeder taste. A shell less version wouldn’t look, act, or taste like an octopus, squid, etc. Nor would it look, act, or taste like a clam or oyster.
I suppose anything is possible, but it would be very hard to raise a shell-less oyster the way they do now. (That is, hanging them out in natural bodies of water and then harvesting later.) They’d get eaten long before you had anything to sell. By the time you could construct artificial tanks of water or protective netting to stop predators, you might be close to the cost of a critter with a shell.
Also, the only muscle these guys need is to open and close the shell. Remove the shell and you’d be growing little more than the internal organs. That’s part of what we eat, but would definitely be different.
Your best bet would probably be to engineer a thinner shell, like mussels.
Actually, the shell-closing muscle makes up only a relatively small part of what we eat in oysters or clams. And I doubt that you could predict exactly what a shell-less bivalve would taste like, nor whether that taste might not be acceptable.
I do agree, however, that the shell is such an integral part of a bivalve and important to its feeding system that it would probably be impossible to eliminate it and still have a functional organism.
The closest thing to a shell-less bivalve is probably the so-called shipworm, and even that has rudimentary shells.
Maybe artificial shells could be produced and the shell-less bivalves placed inside of them. The shell structure would allow the animal to safely grow and behave as they do naturally and when they were ready to be harvested, the artificial shells could be mechanically opened and the organisms removed to be replaced by a new brood of young mollusks. Would at least solve OPs problem of too much energy being spent on producing the shell for quicker growth of shellfish.
The geoduck appears to be halfway to what the OP is seeking. They’ve still got a pair of shells, but their soft parts are so massive that they can’t possibly retreat into their shell. Thus they spend comparatively little effort making a shell, and more effort growing their soft parts. They avoid predation by living deep in the mud of the sea floor, sticking their long siphon up into the clear water to feed/breathe. They are harvested by jamming a running hose nozzle down in the mud right next to them to loosen up the mud and allow the person to grab them by the siphon and pull them up out of their burrow.
Also they’re funny cuz they look kinda like a dick.
Soft shell crabs are eaten whole including the shell. The shell will harden up in time, but perhaps crabs could be bred to have a shell which never hardens. Lobsters also molt and have a soft shell for a while, it starts quite a bit tougher than a crab’s new shell, but perhaps lobsters could be bred with a very soft shell after molting and could be eaten whole like the crabs. I doubt it’s quite as easy to get a clam to develop a soft shell.
ETA: And some people already eat shrimp with the shell on. For the redundantly tiny shrimp you’d hardly notice if you were eating the shell.
Don’t be silly. That would be disgusting.
(seriously though, as an escargot eater myself I’ve asked this question to a few chefs and they supposedly taste really horrible and rancid, by design - that’s mainly how they repel predators, whereas snails have their shells of course)
The composition of the shell of crustaceans and bivalves is fundamentally different. In crustaceans, it’s made up of chitin with added minerals that harden it. In clams it’s calcite or calcite/aragonite, a mineral which is basically as hard as it’s going to get as soon as it’s laid down. So it would be impossible to breed a “soft-shelled” clam analogous to a crab or lobster.
Yes. I was thinking the shell formation process for clams and their relatives would have to fundamentally change. The clam is depositing it’s shell to make a fortress, the crab is growing an exoskeleton with very different needs.
The thing about lobsters is, when they molt, the absorb water to get larger, and secrete a shell now that they’re bigger. That’s how they grow in size. But without a shell to support new, larger, tasty muscle tissue, they instead taste watery.
That seems to be the running theme, either the permanently shell less cephalpods, or a hypothetically shell less bivalve, or a permanently molted lobster – without a shell to support a very strong muscle, they’re just not tasty.
I dunno why soft shell crabs remain tasty however. But I’ve never been a fan of those, so I don’t know if they’re as good as lobster. Heck,I don’t even think lobster is all that great, seems to need butter or some sort of sauce, and comes out watery for me from time to time. An cephalods are definitely tastier with some sort of sauce.
Both lobster and crab are subtle flavors. Crabs are usually cooked with a lot of seasonings, and I think for many people cooked lobster is just a butter delivery system.
I don’t know if there’s much point to the OP. A clam may not grow any faster without a shell. Plenty of bivalves are farm grown protected from the few predators they have. Aquafarms using large tubular tanks can control the temperature, flow rate, and other conditions for rapid growth already. Commercial shellfish processing plants don’t have to throw away those shells either, they get sold for a variety of uses. So naked shellfish may not be much use even if we could create them.