Swamp Stomp
Volume 17, Issue 32
In Maine, soft-shell clams are collected by hand and raked from the mud flats of Maine. Recently, they are becoming less plentiful. This reduction jeopardizes one of New England’s oldest and most historic coastal industries.
Maine is the soft-shell clam capital of the country. Despite this, harvests have generated less than 1.5 million pounds last year. This is the lowest total in 25 years and is down from nearly 8 million pounds at the industry’s peek in the late 1970s.
At one time, the only larger industry than clamming in Maine was the lobster industry.
“Last year was one of the lowest totals since the ’50s,” said Chad Coffin, a Freeport clammer who heads the Maine Clammers Association. “There’s still areas of the coast right now where there just isn’t a lot of clams.”
The threats to clams in Maine include an uptick in predation from green crabs and milky ribbon worms, and the increasing acidification of the ocean. Another problem is that shellfish toxins also sometimes necessitate shellfish harvesting closures, as they did in the state’s eastern coast last year and southern coast this year.
Maine soft-shell clam diggers are still hopeful for a stronger summer this year. The clammers’ association says it’s hoping for a bounce-back year because many clams seem to be reaching legal size, Coffin said.
In order to stabilize the industry long term, it is going to need to adapt, said Brian Beal, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine at Machias. The heightened predation from the crabs and worms has tracked in line with rising coastal water temperatures, which are predicted to keep rising, he said.
According to Beal, predators are the largest threat to clams. One way to negate this threat is by employing strategies such as putting netting around areas of mud flats where clams grow and planting clam seed in protected areas, he said.
“If we don’t adapt, we’re going to be dead in the water,” Beal said. “Unfortunately, our environment has changed.”
Maine is not the only state to harvest soft-shell clams. They are harvested in smaller numbers in Massachusetts and New York. Other states are also experiencing dwindled, like in Rhode Island, where clammers harvested barely 7,000 pounds of softshell clams in 2015 after frequently topping 100,000 pounds in the 2000s.
People are not ideal when trying to come up with a way to protect the soft-shell clams. In Maine, state biologists are working on surveys and protection projects to try to preserve the clams, said Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the state Department of Marine Resources. The number of clammers in the state has held steadily between 1,700 and 2,000 for most of the past ten years.
Coffin said he agrees with Beal that adaptation is vital if they want to revive the industry. If they wait too long the crabs and worms will make it impossible.
“It’s not that there’s not clams,” he said. “It’s that they don’t survive.”
Source: Whittle, Patrick. “Maine’s Soft-shell Clam Industry Is in Jeopardy.” Boston.com. The Boston Globe, 04 July 2017. Web. 06 July 2017.