Yabby Pumping

Paula Mikkelsen and Brian Gollands were in Fort Pierce, Florida, in April to collect bivalves for the Bivalve Tree of Life Project (see www.bivatol.org). Armed with shovel and sieve, and assisted by Sherry Reed from the Smithsonian Marine Station, they searched the seagrass beds for their targeted species. Though the setting is lovely, surrounded by calm water, mangroves, and the occasional splash of a fish or diving bird, the bivalves are few and far between. They found "Yoyo clams" (family Galeommatidae) are tiny clams that live commensally in the burrows of a foot-long mantis shrimp (/Lysiosquilla scabricauda/) on shallow sand flats in the Indian River Lagoon. In April, members of the BivAToL research team went to Ft. Pierce Inlet to search for specimens for the project. This location is actually the "type locality" of 5 species of yoyo clams - that is, they were described as new species from this spot (in the 1980s by PRI's Paula Mikkelsen and Field Museum's Rudiger Bieler, two participants on this trip). Burrows are sampled using a "yabby pump" - a type of bait pump invented in Australia to collect "yabbies" or burrowing shrimps that are used as fish bait. Once a mantis shrimp hole is located, the yabby pump acts like a slurp gun for mud, sucking up the water in the burrow and part of the burrow walls to which the yoyo clams attach. The contents go into a sieve, and the tiny clams (which have internal shells and crawl around like snails) are picked out. We were ...



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