The variety of Shellfish that live on our planet is truly enormous. They exist both in water and on land, and look completely different, being nothing more than each other than one mammal. Because of this, many Shellfish are still very poorly studied, and scientists still have to work hard to fill the gaps in our knowledge about these creatures.
It is still unknown how many of their species are on Earth. Different scientists call numbers from 100 to 200 thousand. About 3000 of them live in Russia. Among all classes of Shellfish, most of them are gastropods, like snails – as many as 80%. Another 19% are bivalves – oysters, mussels and the like. And the remaining 1% falls on all other classes at once. The world’s largest bivalve Shellfish is giant tridacna. She can weigh up to 250 kg, and lives at a depth of 100 meters. The weight of the largest Shellfish ever caught reached 360 kg. He was caught in the 50s of XX century off the coast of Japan.
Most of the Shellfish living in marine and oceanic waters feed on plankton. The largest Shellfish in the world among all species is the giant squid. In length, some individuals reach 18 meters. He is one of the rarest, the first time he was able to photograph only in 2007. The age of all shellfish can be calculated by the number of rings on it, just as the age of most trees is determined by annual rings. One of the exceptions to this rule is baobab, which has no tree rings. The oldest animal on Earth is still considered to be a Shellfish caught near the shores of Iceland. His age, according to scientists, exceeded 400 years.
Octopuses have a unique rectangular-shaped pupil. In the 40s of the 20th century, the rapacious Shellfish of rapana got into the Black Sea from Japan on the bottoms of ships, and since then it has been very fertile, practically displacing mussels, oysters and other competitors, because there are no starfish in the Black Sea that feed on rapana (see Interesting Starfish Facts. Octopuses are the smartest Shellfish in the world. They are trainable and understand the commands. The extinct ammonite Shellfish reached 2 meters in length. Their shells are still sometimes found in the sand and on the seabed. Blood in Shellfish is blue, not red, because the function that iron performs in our blood is copper in their blood (see the interesting facts about copper). Oyster bivalves can change their sex if necessary.
Almost all of the nudibranch Shellfish, of which there are about 3,000 species in the world, are to some degree poisonous. In one season, an ordinary oyster produces more eggs than any other Shellfish – up to a million, or even more. But only a few of them survive. From time to time, the fossilized remains of marine Shellfish are found on the slopes of Everest, the highest mountain in the world. Once it was part of the ocean floor. In 2000, a new type of Shellfish was discovered in the coastal waters of Cuba, resembling a flower and remarkable in that it emits light impulses under the influence of external stimuli.
Shellfish cones hunt fish, literally zaarpunivaya his own tooth. However, they are poisonous, and so much so that they can kill a person. The Shellfish sea slug receives energy through photosynthesis, like plants. 200 years ago in Europe, clams, oysters and mussels were considered food for the poor. They ate them actively, there were few of them left, and they moved into the category of delicacies. Octopuses can mimic like chameleons, changing not only the color of their skin, but also its texture. In the majority of Shellfish, a large part of the body consists of muscles. If people had the same percentage of the mass of the muscles, we could easily lift the weight in half a ton. Shellfish can move, opening and closing the sash quickly. The ejected jet of water creates a reactive force, which helps them move.
In some species of gastropods, snails, teeth, more than any other creature in the world – up to 25,000. Some types of Shellfish like slugs and snails take part in pollination of some plants. Octopuses can throw ink into the water to hide from the enemy. Shellfish are octopuses, octopuses are the only creatures that live in water and have a bird-like beak. In the giant squid, the largest of the Shellfish, the diameter of the eye can reach 65-70 centimeters. The round shell octopus living near the Australian coast is very beautiful, but its bite is deadly poisonous. Poison from one portion can poison 5-7 thousand people.
