Video: Salt-'Licking' clam is latest YouTube sensation

A YouTube video of a clam appearing to lick salt from the surface of a kitchen table has viewed more than 1.2 million times.

But anyone with more than rudimentary knowledge of marine biology could tell you that clams don't have tongues, let alone ones that take up most of the real estate between their two shells. While it appears as if Mr. (or Mrs.) clam is lustily licking up all the salt it can reach, what you're seeing in the video, posted on Sunday by a user named PrincessNeba, is actually the clam's foot. Mollusks, of which clams are members, use the slimy appendage for moving around and digging into the sand where they live. "The poor clam on the kitchen table sticks out its muscular foot in a vain attempt to dig itself into the sediment where it normally lives," Ulrick Riisgård, a marine biologist at the Marine Biological Research Center in Denmark, told Business Insider.