Cockles (hān) are the most commonly eaten shellfish on the southern coast.
Nie Huang, the author of "Sea Mistake Map", said that he had seen a cockle that could fly up into the sky with wings.
this...... Can you believe it?
Hepatitis A storm caused by cockles
In 1988, the people of the whole country hated the Shanghainese. People are reluctant to receive business travelers from Shanghai, to shake hands with Shanghainese, and to eat food produced in Shanghai.
Because of the outbreak of a hepatitis A epidemic in human history in Shanghai, 310,000 people were infected.
In 1988, the Mao Cockle Clinic at Huashan Hospital
Hepatitis A is mainly transmitted through feces - mouth, that is, eating food contaminated with the feces of hepatitis A patients into the mouth is easy to infect. How can this kind of thing happen to Shanghainese who pay attention to hygiene?
Eat cockles.
Cockles are a type of mudflora that Shanghainese love to eat. Its shell has a rib, and there are fine hairs between the ribs, and the mud between the hairs often appears dirty. The people like a pot of hot water to pour down, the shell mouth is slightly open, just cut off, eat the best.
The hemolymphs of cockles are rich in hemoglobin and are bright red
After the outbreak, it was found that more than 80% of hepatitis A patients had eaten cockles before, and that hepatitis A outbreak had three peaks, each of which was pushed forward by 30 days (the incubation period before the onset of hepatitis A), which was exactly the three peaks of Shanghai hair cockle sales.
These cockles were caught from Qidong, Jiangsu Province, and Professor Hu Shanlian and graduate student Wang Jianxiang of Shanghai Medical University went to the cockle-producing sea area in Qidong and detected that the seabed hair cockles contained hepatitis A virus. It turned out that the waters of Qidong were heavily contaminated with resident feces, and the hepatitis A virus was inhaled by cockles and enriched in the body.
In 1988, the news report of the outbreak of hepatitis A in Shanghai was just beginning
The evidence was conclusive, and the Shanghai government immediately ordered a ban on the sale of mao cockles. This ban lasted from 1988 to today. However, in today's Shanghai, you can still buy hair cockles explicitly or implicitly.
In a survey in the 1980s, when Shanghai residents ate cockles at a rate of 32.1%, 1 in 3 people ate cockles. In the earlier days when shanghai people still used wooden toilets, when every family went to the river to wash toilets, they had to throw some cockle shells into it and stir. The ribs on the shell can scrape dirty things clean. It can be seen how common the people's cockles are.
Not only Shanghai, but also the entire southeast coast, cockles are extremely popular shellfish. Chaoshan and Fujian New Year, cockles are an indispensable dish, after eating, the shell should be sprinkled in the courtyard, under the bed, called "cockle shell money", symbolizing wealth, after a few days to sweep away.
Image from: "New Year on the Tip of the Tongue"
Eating more, people slowly classed the cockles. In "Sea Mistake Map", Nie Huang painted cloth cockles, silk cockles, vermilion cockles, giant cockles and so on.
The cloth cockle is the most elaborate one he paints, he said: "The cloth cockle, whose pattern is better than cloth, is also called corrugated." ...... The ancients said the same thing. It shows that this is the most common kind of cockle, each shell has more than a dozen poles, and there are many small knots on each larva, which is definitely what is called "mud cockles" in biology today.
The mud cockle mountain in "Please Answer 1988"
Cockles also have a name in ancient books: luán (天脔). It is a small piece of meat, which can be understood as "this meat should only be in heaven".
However, Nie Huang had a different understanding of Tianxun. He believes that the true meaning of the word is simple and crude: "Cockles fell from the sky." Because he had seen a cockle that really had wings.
The red shell in the Japanese material comes from a larger species of cockle: the cockle
This time Nie Huang didn't make it up
There is a "silk cockle" in the "Sea Fault Map", and the appendix reads: "Its pattern is like silk." Produced in the middle of the Sea Tu, the small one is like a plum core, and the big one is like a peach core, although the taste is not as good as the vermilion cockle, but better than the cloth cockle. ”
The "silk cockle" with small wings in the "Sea Fault Map" may be a hairy cockle, but it is not easy to confirm with such a picture alone
Each of these cockles has four or five bean sprout-like objects. Look at the text description at the back: "After May, the wings are born in the shell and can fly." Hairen Yun: Whenever you go here and there, there are sudden and non-existent, but it can vary from one or two miles. But only silk cockles can fly, but cloth cockles can't. Frequently read book cloud: cockle a Kui lu, also known as Tianlu. I don't understand the saying of the heavenly cockle, and the smell of the silk cockle has wings that can fly, and I know that there is flesh falling from the sky, and what is not the heavenly cockle? "It seems that this bean sprout is actually the wings of a cockle!" Cockles can also fly into the air and migrate over long distances. Nie Huang therefore determined that tianzhen was exactly this kind of flying cockle.
When I saw this text three years ago, I didn't believe it at all. Until one day, a netizen asked me: "When eating cockles, I found something strange on the shell of the cockle, what is it?" "When I looked at the picture, I saw that the cockle had two transparent bean sprouts on it, exactly the same as in the "Sea Fault Map"!
It seems that Nie Juan was wrong before...
Willow dark flowers, finally solved the case!
In 2018, I met Zeng Wencui of Xiamen University by chance. Talking about the cockle, she said: "It is very similar to the egg sac of the square-spotted Dongfeng snail (ivory phoenix snail), and may be an approximation of it. ”
In April 2019, I was looking for clues about "fly cockles" online, just in time for the birth season of fly cockles, so I finally met a mysterious creature that I did not believe in its existence, a flying cockle that I had not seen in three years.
It was observed that the "wings" on each cockle, without exception, were attached to the leading edge of the cockle shell, that is, the part where the clams exposed their mud surface when they were alive. This indicates that some kind of animal was born on the shell of a cockle while crawling on the mud.
All "wings" grow on the areas where the cockles expose their mud surface
Some of the egg sacs still have a single egg in them
At the same time, Zeng Wencui, a girl who was studying graduate school at Xiamen University, used a microscope to observe the small particles inside the "wings" and found that it was indeed the juvenile of a conch!
In the different "wings", the various stages of development of the snail can be found: fertilized eggs, 4-cell stage, face disc larvae, larvae that grow snail shells, and everything is available.
Under the microscope, some of the eggs in the oocyst have grown into larvae with snail shells
Wencui conducted genetic testing on "wings", which is the most accurate way to identify species. A few days later, the results came out: the 18S2 gene fragment of the small wing was 99.86% similar to that of Sydaphera spengleriana. However, it does not match the COI gene of the diamond snail. The COI gene is relatively specific, and if it is comparable, it means that it is the same species.
Therefore, the test result is that the "wings" of the flying cockle are the egg sacs laid by a snail, which belongs to the same genus as the diamond snail, but is not a diamond snail. I looked up the oocyst morphology of this genus again, which is exactly the same as the "wing".
Diamond snail (clothing core snail). The snail that lays its eggs on the shell is its relative, and it must look like it
Although no species have been identified, it is already quite difficult to identify the genus. I can responsibly say that the wings on the shell of the "silk cockle" in the Sea Fault Map are the eggs laid by a small sea snail of the genus Nucleus. In late spring, it crawls in shallow waters, scattering its eggs on the ocean floor. In order to breathe and feed, the cockle will expose the leading edge of the shell to the mud surface and become the favorite spawning place of the conch.
I guess that when humans catch cockles, disturbed by the sea and the sea breeze, the egg sacs will swing slightly, and if you don't look closely, you may mistakenly think that the cockles are "flapping their wings", and after adding oil and vinegar, the legend of the flying cockles comes out.
Written, photographed | Canaan
WeChat Editor | glad
This article was originally published in the December 2020 issue of Naturalist magazine