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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick. And in this episode, we're going to be diving deeper on a topic that we first explored just a little bit on an episode of Anamalia Stupendium, which of course is one of our shorties that airs on Wednesdays. And that is the subject of the giant clam. I found this to be a fascinating topic to explore, because on one hand, the giant clam is just an amazing organism, notable not only for its size, but also for its unique symbiosis. But in addition to this, it's an organism that has continually invited creative but highly inaccurate ideas about how they actually behave.

It's not hard to see why people might look at this thing and think that it will bite you because it just looks like the whole thing is just a pair of jaws, like cartoon teeth.

Yes, yeah. And as we'll be exploring, I think the really interesting thing here is that you see

this idea, this interpretation resonating not only with people who don't know any better,

who are, you know, one or multiple degrees away from this organism and its natural habitat,

but also people in close proximity to it, or just can be overwhelmed by the

fact that it looks like a big mouth. What if it was like a big mouth? And what would the

consequences of that be? The most pervasive idea, of course, is we're talking about the idea that a

giant clam might latch on to your leg while you were diving or snorkeling, or even in a very

cartoon sense, swallow you whole. And to be clear, just to go ahead and get this out at the top,

this has never happened. There's no recorded evidence of it ever happening, and for reasons,

we'll discuss very good reasons. it pretty much never could happen.

That's right. There's like one really famous anecdote of a guy claiming that it happened and he was

there. And I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me. There are strong reasons for thinking

that this story is not true. And other than that, it's mostly just vague generalizations from people not citing any evidence or fictional storytelling.

Right, right. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong in the water, and there are lots of ways you can become injured and so forth. But this is not really

one of them. And I think if you were going to pin your death on a giant clam, it would be like,

you would have to essentially like strap yourself to the giant clam and die and drown underwater.

You would have to frame it in a major and significant way. So yeah, in some

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