Ming The Clam

I think it’s pretty fitting that the oldest animal in the world highlights the oddities, greediness and curiosity of the human psyche.

I’m not really that clued up with the latest news, although I try, some just slip me by, like the important email at work that I accidentally delete. Well I only found out recently that scientists discovered the oldest living animal (well it was October 2007 actually, read here) . Great I originally thought, and decided to look into a bit more. It turns out it was a clam who had lived between 405 – 410 years old and is considered the oldest living animal in the world. It was dredged off the coast of Iceland and found its way into a laboratory. Now (although I’m led to believe) the only way to find out the age of this animal was to kill it. As simple as that. Now this concept sent my mind spiralling into many different directions as I tried to think this through, how Mr Paddington’s Shadow would deal with a situation like this and another under the guise of a scientist. The question I ask is why kill it? It’s likely that from its shell that it was old anyway or at least an interesting specimen for scientists, otherwise it wouldn’t have ended up in a laboratory. So why not just let it live, sure if you want to quarantine it somewhere, do so, I don’t think Clams are big movers anyway, but why stab it, shot it or tear it apart just to find out its age? I can only think that it was certain types of motivations that led to this action. Perhaps the science team couldn’t resist, they just couldn’t resist from fame not just amongst their revered colleagues but also the mainstream exposure. The thought that their generation, their collective group was the first to discover the oldest clam in the world (not some fisherman off the coast of Iceland). Are these thing things motivate us? Being considered a great amongst your peers and admired to some degree by the general public. I’m not being judgemental here, the people that killed the clam were working in the remit of their expertise, their livelihood, probably their passion. Would I do something equally as challenging if would reap the rewards in an area I love (fuck knows what it is but being part of an artistic project does stimulate me)? Yet there’s the other option which the rational kinder aspect of me that refuses to empathise with the scientists has to say. And it says, let the clam live. Let it see out its natural life, maybe it could live another 100 or 1000 years. So you as a scientist won’t be able to claim fame and someone else down the string of time will be there the day Ming pops his clogs and who in turn will probably ejaculate in his pants out of sheer excitement when telling the press. Weighing up the two consequences from the result of the two actions there is really not much of a contest if you can relinquish yourself from glory. Let it live and let it go. Just like the lady from Titanic did with her nice shiny jewel so that one day someone else could find it in an oceanic exploratory mission.


One thing I want to know is if they’ll be an investigation on Ming as he certainly didn’t die of natural causes.


P.S. The font is the way it is because Blogger is being pants this evening.