900,000 clams and 800 bags of oyster spat

This past week I volunteered to help Washington's Department of Fish and Wildlife seed baby Manilla Clams and Pacific Oysters in two local parks. If there is one thing I've learned after spending hours of time on the beach every week all winter long, it is that I don't know a damn thing about our local beach ecosystems or the ocean as a whole. Since hands-on experiences seemed the best type of education for me, I signed up.

On Monday, I, along with about 12 other volunteers and two folks from the Dept. seeded 900,000 baby Manilla Clams at a beach on the south end of Indian Island. On Wednesday, about 50 people showed up to spread 800 bags of "spat" on a 5-acre site near Shine Tidelands State Park.

Indeed I did learn quite a bit, but learning always come easy at the beginning of any new subject. It will take about 2 years for both of these species to become harvestable, and this re-seeding is an annual event.

The clams especially seemed to have had a long journey to arrive at this site in large coolers. If I remember correctly, they were born on the west coast of California, then spent about 4 months quickly growing in size in Hawaii, then spend another few months back on the west coast, possibly of Washington. These little guys were about 9 months old.

And so my confusion with the whole process began. If these little buggers grow here naturally (though neither species we were seeding are actually native), why are the harvests large enough to warrant the need for reseeding allowed every year? Why aren't fewer just harvested, allowing a natural re-population?


I have a feeling this is highly political. If I understood correctly, it is the fees and possibly the taxes that the commercial fisherman pay that directly pay for this reseeding effort. Perhaps there is a trade-off there? "If you will allow me to take x million dollars more of catch, I'll toss a few million your way for reseeding." That is my more cynical thinking. On the other hand, people hold what they can see, feel, and eat at a higher value. So, since the areas we were seeding are for sport shellfish diggers and not commercial, perhaps it is part of a bigger plan for getting the public involved in caring about the ecosystem. And then there is the revenue of individual shellfish licenses, which must add up to a pretty penny every year also. Shortening the season or reducing the allowable number of clams and oysters to be harvested would probably cut into the number of people forking out money for the privilege.

Environmentally, it is possibly a net gain. These baby clams (at least the 25% estimated to survive to a harvest-able size) will go on to have more than a year of time that they will be cleaning and filtering their foster-home waters before they are harvest-able. Now that sounds nice, especially since Puget Sound is not known for being a pristine waterway, but remember, these clams have already been shipped across the ocean twice. And believe me, they are HEAVY. That doesn't sound so great for the level of carbon in our atmosphere. It would probably take a fair amount of scientific calculation to see if the Earth as a whole comes out ahead.

And still I am left wondering why we are not seeding native species instead of non-native (though seemingly benign and non-invasive) species. One Dept. guy did have an answer for the oysters: the native and highly endangered Olympia Oysters are not legal to harvest, though there is one commercial fishery that can legally take them. The purposes of these oysters is mainly for recreation. I would imagine the other reason is economic. With more than a million (yes MILLION) dollars shelled out for this combined crop of shellfish, I imagine they are looking for the cheapest species to use.

One thing that I imagine is a net gain are the clams that decide to migrate out of the park they are planted in, and the oysters whose larvae end up farther down the beach. On the whole, I would imagine it works out to a net gain of overall shellfish in the region. I think I will need to have a much greater understanding of all of it, from biological to political, for it to become coherent in my own head. In the meantime, I'll plan to keep learning!

~M