Most of the shelled invertebrate creatures from the Bivalvia class are called mussels, and some of them are called oysters. Mussel, scientifically speaking, is a mollusk that has a shell in two parts, and these parts are joined together and integrated. The fact that it is a food consumed with pleasure by many people has enabled this creature to maintain its popularity. This creature, which is cooked and consumed especially in the form of stuffed mussels or fried mussels, is very delicious when eaten well cleaned from reliable places.
Since the mussel is a living creature, it also has an age. So how to calculate the age of a mussel?
Research has found a method to calculate the age of mussels. A scientist named Ida Thompson, a Princeton University lecturer who has been researching mussels for many years, has revealed that the age of mussels can be calculated by the rings on their shells. This situation is likened to rings on a tree trunk. As it is known, each ring formed on the trunk of a tree is formed by one complete rotation of the earth around the sun. The older a tree is, the more rings it has. Mussels are like trees. Each ring in the mussel shell forms in exactly one year. According to research, the more rings there are on the shell, the older the mussel is. That is, the lines on the shell show the age of the mussel.
These rings also provide a kind of data about the general condition of the sea throughout the year. When the mussels are examined carefully, it is seen that the widths of the rings are different from each other. There are many factors that affect these differences. For example, sea temperatures are one of the biggest factors in this regard. Water temperature affects the amount of oxygen and nutrients in the water necessary for living things. If there are differences in the widths between the rings in a mussel, the temperature at the sea bottom has changed during that year, thus there has been a change in the amount of food and oxygen in the water.
