Being nice June Saturday, and given the fact that my wife and eldest are off doing the anime convention thing so I’m on the lookout for things to keep the younger two kids distracted from the fact that mom’s not here, we took a trip out to a local park to do a short hike through the woods and marshes along the James River, then decided to take a ride out to Hopewell VA, the next town over, and visited City Point, a park with some Civil War significance regarding the battle of Petersburg, and happens to overlook the confluence of the James and Appomatox rivers.

We walked along the water’s edge for a while, stopping along the way for the kids to pick up shells – the area is, if not brackish, only a few miles off from where the waterways become so – they ended up with a whole big pile of bivalve shells, a handful of crab bits, and a bunch of pretty smooth river rocks.

As we were going through the shells, we found that one of them we picked up belonged to a live clam. I did a little research, and learned that it was, in fact, an asian clam (Corbicula fluminea), an invasive species not native to North America, but is indeed a fresh water clam, and that some people have actually kept them in freshwater aquariums, though few have had much success.

The kids, being somewhat attached to the little guy, who sat in a small container sticking his filter out and trying to feed (it’s smaller than a penny), wanted to keep it. Of course, people who do keep these clams (you can buy them in the aquarium trade in some places) tend to have lots of horror stories about them slowly starving in community tanks (they eat plankton and stuff, and most home aquariums are, in fact, too clean), though they’re relatively harmless, if dull.

Having been pulled from the water within sight of a large Honeywell chemical plant along the river, and along a shoreline that, frankly, isn’t particularly clean, I am worried about what sort of ridealongs this little guy is carrying. Of course, he’s rather sprightly (for a clam, anyway), so I decided to try and set up a quarantine tank – I knocked together a simple sponge filter for a one gallon tank, mixed some of my tank water from the 30gal, some gravel, and a handful of java moss. It’s sitting on top of the larger tank’s light fixture, which is keeping the water somewhat warm.

Several hours later the clam (as well as a couple of little arthropod things that look a bit like scuds) are still alive and doing bivalve (and arthropod) sort of things. I still don’t hold out hope that they’ll make it for the long term, but I’ve done my fatherly best to provide a hospitable environment for the strange little creatures my children manage to bring home. However, I don’t know too many parents who’ve had to try to create a hospitable environment for a clam.

We’ll see how it goes.