Viagra on the Half Shell

ON A WINTRY MOONLIT night on Totten Inlet at Puget Sound's southern tip, a reformed screenwriter named Jim Gibbons is standing ankle-deep in the wash, contemplating thousands of sawed-off PVC plastic tubes that gleam, white and uniform as military gravestones, against the muck. He's also standing in the vanguard of the latest entrepreneurial frenzy to seize a region and an industry given to booms and busts. And he's on the front line of an aquacultural "blue revolution" that, depending on whom you listen to, will help save the seas from overfishing and humanity from hunger or ravage the world's coasts just as reckless agriculture has its uplands.

At the moment, however, he's thinking more prosaic thoughts: How can he help the tender little clams planted inside these tubes survive ravenous crabs, abrasive sand dollars, and suffocating silt to become giant geoducks? How long until other growers notice how much money can be made from these ugly critters and crowd the tideflats and markets? How long till the Chinese or Japanese figure out how to grow their own damn geoducks? And why are so many conspicuous consumers in Shanghai willing to pay $50 or $100 for an oversized clam that used to be cheap chowder meat? Might it have something to do with the way geoducks look?

That look, so evocative both of an elephant's trunk and of elephant-mating footage on TV nature shows (geoducks cannot retract into their undersized shells), used to draw blushes and giggles from the tourists at the Pike Place Market—back when the clams were cheap enough to be sold at the Market. But looks are only one of many remarkable attributes of the clam that the native Nisquallies called gweduc and later generations of Northwesterners came to know as simply "ducks." Contrary to fairly common belief, gweduc is not the world's largest clam; the tropical Pacific giant clam grows much larger. But it is the largest burrowing bivalve, digging its way three or more feet down into the muck and sand and growing its celebrated dual-siphon neck in order to reach the oxygen and phytoplankton in the waters above. Once dug in they root for life, which can be a very, very long time.

Adult geoducks suffer no known diseases and can easily outlive the humans who prey on them; one had 146 annual growth rings on its shell. They may reach 20 pounds, though seven is more typical and two a common harvest size. One local clammer claims to have dug a 17-pounder out from five and a half feet deep, with a helper holding his feet.

Gweduc were a staple of the Northwest Indians (some of whom say today, "When the tide's out, the refrigerator door's open"). For the whites along Puget Sound, they were cheap, delicious chowder meat.

No more. In the mid-'80s, geoduck became a sushi staple and Japanese buyers priced out local vendors. Then China's nouveau riche discovered the outlandish-looking clam and outbid the Japanese. Word filtered back of Hong Kong diners paying $100 to choose their live geoducks from restaurant tanks. Wholesale prices shot up to $12 a pound before settling down to a still-hefty $6 to $8.50, depending on quality. The state of Washington, which owns subtidal lands, takes in over $6 million a year by leasing out geoduck concessions to divers, who blow away the enclosing mud with high-powered compressors. Indian tribes make millions more.

This boom brought the first signs of overfishing and a new Wild West-style crime: geoduck rustling for the thriving black market. In 1997, a Las Vegas seafood broker was convicted of buying $330,000 worth of poached geoduck and hiring an attacker to punish a rival broker for bidding up the price of the clams. In 1998, in a case promptly dubbed "Clamscam," six men were convicted of stealing ducks from state lands.

But rustlers weren't the only adventurers lured by the windfall; Puget Sound shellfish growers dreamed of adding geoduck to the oysters, mussels, and other clams they already grew. The problem, as former state shellfish biologist Lynn Goodwin recalls, was that "very little was known about the biology of the geoduck." Despite their lurid looks, ducks are notoriously finicky and unpredictable breeders. Nevertheless, in the mid-'60s, state biologists set out to unravel the geoduck's mysteries; by the early '90s they'd found the fine balance of temperature, algal nutrients, and other conditions that may, with luck, induce ducks to breed and their larvae to grow.

Private growers and speculators have had mixed success putting these findings to work. "I haven't sold a geoduck yet," laments one local shellfish pioneer, Don Dahman, who breeds the clams in his own hatchery but finds that the nutrient-rich waters he draws from Totten Inlet smother many of the delicate larvae.

Dahman's much larger neighbor, Taylor Shellfish, a third-generation family firm with 250 employees, has fared better. Taylor's secret is the cold, pure water its hatchery draws from a deep pipe in Hood Canal. The sprawling hatchery, which also breeds oysters, scallops, and other clams, is ready-made for a horror-movie set; once, for fun, the crew even completed the effect with dry ice. Scores of translucent plastic and fiberglass tanks, from 400 to 8,000 liters in size, bubble like a primordial soup. Lit from above, they glow in a rainbow of autumnal hues, gold and sienna and musty green—the colors of the various algae meticulously cultured to feed the millions of microscopic shellfish larvae. As he checks for protozoan invasions that might wipe out the larvae, hatchery technician Brian Williamson describes the travails of shellfish breeding with paternal pride and chagrin. Manila clams go at breeding as avidly as sailors on shore leave, but geoducks are much more shy, Williamson explains. "Geoducks are the most difficult of all, after the rock scallops, and those are really temperamental." Temperature, salinity, oxygen, and nutrient loads—all must be just right to set the mood and then nurture the infant ducks, and still those may perish for no evident reason.

Lunatics and hermaphrodites