FishProfiles.com Message Forums

I have a friend with a pond and the bottom is lined with what looks like a fresh water clams. so I picked one up brought it home and cleaned it and put it in my tank (that was alredy cloudy for some reason.)And he is filtering my tank very well and I was wondering if it would be a good idea to switch between tanks or get rid of him all together.

(I've had him about a month

Keep the clam where it is. Moving an animal, whether it be a fish, clam, or whatever around all of the time is never a good thing. How big is the clam and what type is it? Was your tank with the cloudy water cycled?

I'd watch that clam closely.

Bad news if it dies suddenly, because live clams and dead clams have a habit of looking alike. Unlike creatures that move around to perform their daily life tasks.

Your other problem will manifest itself if that clam is a female. Female clams produce lots of eggs. If those eggs are fertilised by a male clam, then the result is teeming hordes of larval clams. Several species of freshwater clam produce larval clams known as Glochidia, and these are parasitic on fishes. Which means that if you put much prized fishes in the aquarium, and your clam turns out to be a female with a batch of fertile egs ready to roll, the fishes end up suffering a massive Glochidia infestation.

How do you determine a clam's gender? Dissection usually. And even then, you'll need trained professional help to answer the question correctly. Because even when you dissect your clam, ovaries and testes look pretty much alike until you prepare them in a microtome for slicing and staining prior to examination under the microscope. Of course, you could make life easier and use a fluorescence microscope and specialised fluorochrome dyes that attach preferentially to sperm or egg cells, but this assumes you have access to a fluorescence microscope in the first place, which is unlikely for one simple reason - a basic one will set you back $3,000 and up, while a quality instrument for a pathology or histology lab will carry a price tag of $20,000 and up. If you had that kind of money sloshing around your bank account right now, chances are you'd have spent it on a nice Rift Lake setup with "wish list" species such as benthochromis tricoti (a sky high desirable Tanganyikan Cichlid that will set you back $400 a pop).

So, watch that clam. Plenty of scope for mischief there despite the fact that it doesn't move much.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

It is quite large and it does move alot like a foot a day well thanx alot u guys are