Looking more like an alien spaceship with a slimy probe, a clam opens up and extends a tentacle as long as its shell across a kitchen table littered with salt. If the residents didn’t realize it was alive, this must have shocked them.
The Mail Online reports,
Though it looks like a long white tongue the appendage is actually the clam’s ‘foot,’ which is useful for checking the landscape, movement, and even burrowing.
In a review of the video for i09, Scripps Institution of Oceanography biologist Miriam Goldstein said the clam seems to be trying to understand its environment.
‘It’s probably trying to find a place to dig,’ he says. ‘I doubt the salt has anything to do with it.’
Clams actually eat by filtering dissolved and suspend food particles through gills.