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In February 1954 , a US biologist named Frank Brown discovered something so remarkable, so inexplicable, that his peers essentially wrote it out of history. Brown had dredged a batch of Atlantic oysters from the seabed off New Haven, Connecticut, and shipped them hundreds of miles inland to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Then he put them into pans of brine inside a sealed darkroom, shielded from any changes in temperature, pressure, water currents, or light. Normally, these oysters feed with the tides. They open their shells to filter plankton and algae from the seawater, with rest periods in between when their shells are closed. Brown had already established that they are most active at high tide, which arrives roughly twice a day. He was interested in how the mollusks time this behavior, so he devised the experiment to test what they would do when kept far from the sea and deprived of any information about the tides. Would their normal feeding rhythm persist?

For the first two weeks, it did. Their feeding activity continued to peak 50 minutes later each day, in time with the tides on the oysters’ home beach in New Haven. That in itself was an impressive result, suggesting that the shellfish could keep accurate time. But then something unexpected happened, which changed Brown’s life forever.