A word about swimming with ... mollusks

If you had to choose, would you like to swim with dolphins or swim with mollusks? The wise choice is... mollusks. But why?

There is a place in Japan where dolphins love to swim, and their reason to choose that location is mollusks. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of tender, succulent mollusks--a favorite food for dolphins. Happy dolphins, unhappy mollusks. The dolphins can come and go, but the mollusks can't. All they can do is sit there in their shells and wait to be eaten, but nobody cries for mollusks. Everybody loves dolphins.

It's only natural. Dolphins are cute. They smile for the camera. Mollusks don't. They sit there, day in and day out, sucking in seawater and spitting it out. They do this because that's how they get their food. It isn't pretty, but it works. In with detritus-laden seawater, out with detritus-free seawater. All day, every day, Mother Nature's sea filtering mollusks do their thing.

What do dolphins do, besides performing amazing aquatic gymnastics and gobbling up mollusks? I beg your pardon if this sounds gross, but after they've eaten, they poop. You can think of it as feeding the mollusks, if you like.

What happens when the water-filtering mollusks get ahead of the dolphins? The sea water stays clean, and a lot of mollusks live to be harvested--and sold--by happy humans who also like to eat.

What happens when the pooping dolphins get ahead of the mollusks?

Hmmm...

We will have that answer if the noisy humans who choose one animal to love and ignore the rest of Mother Nature's creatures succeed in ruining the balance between dolphins and mollusks in Taiji Cove.