New research by Lindsey Dougherty of the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that scaring off predators or luring prey may be the primary motivations for the disco clam’s flashy behavior.

Dougherty first became fascinated with disco clams when she was shocked by their display during a dive in Indonesia. “It was on that trip I first saw the disco clam, and immediately fell in love,” reminisced Dougherty.

There was something peculiar about dolphins that puzzled the prolific British zoologist Sir James Gray in 1936. He had observed the sea mammals swimming at a swift rate of more than 20 miles per hour, but his studies proposed that dolphins simply do not have the strength to swim so fast. The conundrum came to be known as “Gray’s Paradox.”

The all-volunteer MMC spearheaded several rescue efforts of dolphins and small whales that drew international news coverage over the past 20 years, most recently after a 2011 mass stranding of pilot whales in the Lower Keys.

Legal advertisements published in The Reporter this month say the former MMC property will be sold at public auction at 11 a.m. Jan. 8 on the front steps of the Monroe County courthouse on Key West's Whitehead Street.