Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

Purple varnish clams, aka mahogany clams or Nuttalia obscurata, are yet another invasive from Asia. About two decades ago they were introduced to the West Coast from ship’s ballast waters.

Varnish clams are bimodal benthic feeders, which is a fancy way of saying they can filter food out of the sand and eat whenever they please. Other clams have to wait until the tide is in to feed.

These clams are edible and you can harvest them recreationally in BC, Washington, and Oregon. A few years ago farmers in BC began marketing them as “savoury clams.” But just because something is edible doesn’t mean you should eat it. Although some people rave about them, we find varnish clams to be mealy, soft, and pretty disgusting. {UPDATE: This might be because we’ve only tried them in the summer, and maybe they’re more seasonal than other clams?}  They also seem to be particularly susceptible to pea crab infestations:

Final reason why we’re wary:  because they filter sand, they can potentially consume toxins or resting algal cysts that other filter feeders aren’t exposed to.

So, what to do with the varnish clam? Even though they’re not delicious, they are spectacular looking, so we started making earrings out of them:

Maybe we would have sold more if the photo had been in focus? Hard to tell.

Last thing about varnish clams: one time, while out digging clams for earring production, a family approached and asked what we were doing. We explained that the clams were bright purple inside and very beautiful and that we were going to use them for jewelry. To prove our point, we stepped on a clam, breaking it into pieces. But surprise! The clam was bright white inside. It was the first white varnish clam we’d ever found, and we’d smashed it. Since then we’ve found a handful of others. Has anyone else ever found an albino varnish clam?

Should you find yourself with a fresh geoduck on your hands, here’s what to do.

1. Cut the geoduck out of its shell.

Be sure that you get all the tender meat off of the inside of the shell.

2. Remove shell and the guts. Notice the large round thing in the photo below? That’s the geoduck’s stomach, and if it doesn’t turn your stomach, you can add it to chowder or soup.

At this point, you may make several interesting discoveries in the pile of geoduck guts, such as a skinny, translucent worm-like thing or a miniature, moving crab. Ignore them and move on to step 3.

3. Pour hot water over the geoduck, focusing on areas covered in skin. Another way to do this is to submerge the geoduck in hot water.

4. After blanching the geoduck, the skin should peel off. Like nylon. You may need to pour more hot water over the sticky spots.

5. Everything that remains is edible. We’ll tell you how to actually prepare the geoduck in a later post.

Geoduck shell photo shoot.

A couple of weeks ago we harvested a boatload of geoduck. They took over the retail live tank and proceeded to squirt salt water all over the store, completely trashing the place.

Dorothy, Ona, and Beth came by when the geoduck were in town, and were quite impressed by the giant bivalves. The three ladies spent a considerable amount of time trying to photograph a geoduck mid-squirt, and then posed for a photograph:

People always come into the retail store asking for geoduck, and we always disappoint.

But not this weekend: today Dave and Jim spent a few hours out on the nether reaches of the tideflats, digging geoduck. We have 25 or so the ducks available to sell. The price is $10 a pound, and the clams weigh between 3 and 4 pounds each. If you want us to ship the geoduck please call 888-877-5844 to place an order.

Last fall one of our friends found a vein of petrified clams while building a road near Mineral, Washington. The three foot thick, forty foot long clam vein was found at 2800 feet in elevation.

We were intrigued by the petrified clams, and began investigating. We started with Seattle-based geologist John LaManna, who said the clams had been found in the “Rocks of the Puget” group, which is a rock formation deposited during the Eocene epoch, about 40 million years ago.

Next we sent photos of the clams to scientists at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum. Turns out the clams are members of the genus Corbicula. They’re common swamp clams that were plentiful in this area  millions of years ago, before the Cascade Mountains were formed, when northwest Washington was covered with giant swamps and huge river deltas.

Want some colorful language about molluscan fossils? Check out this very eloquent NY Times piece about a fossilized oyster.

Native littleneck clam on the left, Manila steamer on the right.

Manilas were introduced to Puget Sound along with the Pacific Oyster in the 1950s and, like the oyster, have since naturalized. They’re now the main clam species grown and harvested commercially in the Puget Sound, as their shells are hardier and they last longer post-harvest than the native littleneck.

How to tell them apart? In general, the native clams are lighter colored than Manilas, but the biggest difference is in the profile of the shell. As you can see from the photo above, the native clams are more circular in shape.

Two Manilas, one littleneck.

Cockle clams are extremely beautiful, and occasionally eaten, but aren’t harvested commercially.

Pretty cockle shells, all in a row.

These cockles are called Nuttall’s cockles, or, more whimsically, heart cockles, so-called because when you look at the clam from the side the shell resembles a (somewhat squashed) heart.

Go here for a picture of a live heart cockle.

Heart cockles don’t live as deep in the sand as most other clams do. Instead they rely on their thick, ribbed shell to protect them from predators. They also have sensory organs along their mantle (visible in the link above) that can detect approaching predators, and they use their foot to drag themselves to safety. If they’re lucky, they can live up to 15 years.

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Appearance:

1. “Like the leathery snout of an aardvark”

2. an “eye-catching,” “monster . . . thing, of incredible longevity, with a certain . . . charisma.”

3. a “homely” “behemoth of the beach”

Texture of neck when live:

4. “much like the skin of your elbow when your arm is straightened”

Taste:

5. Like the lobster of the clam family.

6. Rich without being at all fishy. Fresh, crisp. Surprisingly delicious.

There’s a lot of geoduck information out on the triple-W. Some of our favorites, which we quoted above (#1 and 2): this Seattle Times story, and a CDNN story, also via the Seattle Times, titled “Clam Scam II: The Great Geoduck Caper.” It’s as fun as it sounds.

Also check out Wikipedia for the picture of the geoduck with the stupendously long neck.