Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

One Saturday a few weekends ago at least ten customers came into the seafood store asking for mussels. And that got us thinking: why don’t we sell mussels? There are plenty out on the beach. So last Friday Nathan and Miguelito spent two minutes collecting about 75 pounds of mussels, and then about two hours processing them (removing rocks, separating them from one another, etc). We sold them over the weekend in the retail store.

To be more precise: we had them for sale over the weekend in the retail store. We didn’t sell much of anything because a freak blizzard blew through town, knocked the power out, and cramped everyone’s style.

These are native blue mussels, Mytilus edulis. They’re wild, and they look like it. And they really like to cuddle with one another. After just one day in our live tanks they’d reconnected into a solid, mussel-y mass. That’s the coolest thing about mussels: they have byssal threads (also called beards) that they can use to move themselves very short distances. They throw the thread out, then contract their byssel muscle to pull themselves that direction. (They still couldn’t hold a candle to a clam in a foot race, though.)

The invasive Mediterranean mussel was introduced into Puget Sound in the 1700s in ballast waters and again later by commercial shellfish farmers.  Blue mussels are smaller and don’t live as long as the Mediterraneans, but the two species can interbreed.

Oysters, mussels, and steamer clams.

We steamed mussels on Saturday night in some dry white wine and melted butter. They were amazing.

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.

Oysters go through a larval stage, swimming around in the water for about 2 weeks, and then they settle down, develop shells, and remain stationary for the rest of their lives. Oyster larvae can set on just about anything: wood, rocks, other oysters, and metal. This particular oyster made his home in an old butter clam shell.

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.

The geoduck clam is the biggest clam in the world. Pictured here is a teensy two year old, but they can live to be 150 years old, or older. They frequently weigh more than 5 pounds. And yes, they’re ridiculous.

Geoduck live deep in the sand, and while they can retract their neck to avoid predators, they can’t retreat completely into their shells, like horseclams can.

One geoduck with broken shell, two horseclams.

Eye of horseclam

Disco Duck

According to the Principia Cybernetica Project’s definition of happiness,

happy people are characterized by the belief that they are able to control their situation, whereas unhappy people tend to believe that they are a toy of fate.

Yet another reason to associate clams with happiness: clams, unlike oysters, can move when they’re feeling crowded, bored, threatened by a moon snail, or fed-up with their neighbors. They use their foot:

to drag themselves across the tideflats and to dig a new hole. As you walk across the beach you can see little trails in the sand where a clam labored its way across the flats:

The holes in the sand are all siphon holes for various species of clam.

Maybe this summer we’ll race a butter clam against a moon snail, and see which one is faster. But given the carnage shown in yesterday’s post, our bet’s on the snail.

Oysters, completely immobile as adults, mainly live crowded together in massive clusters. Of course, there wouldn’t be much point in an oyster believing in its ability to control its situation, because clearly it is truly a toy of fate.

As mentioned in the last post, moon snails enjoy snacking on native butter clams.

Tangent: humans also enjoy snacking on butter clams… they make amazing chowder, fritters, and clam strips. Grandpa Bart likes them sliced in half and deep fried in the shell. But because butter clams require more work than the simple-to-cook and delicious Manila steamer clams, they don’t sell well in the retail store. But if you want to try butter clams yourself, let us know and we’ll dig some for you!

But for moon snails, butter clams make more sense, because they’re bigger and meatier than Manilas.

Death by moon snail doesn’t look or sound like much fun. The moon snail feeds by first softening its victim’s shell with a secreted chemical and then drilling away at the softened shell with its sand-paper like tongue, called a radula. Once the hole is complete, it sucks out the meat of the clam using the tongue. The dual-function tongue is also referred to as a ‘mouth part.’

This clam just barely escaped with its shell intact.

This one wasn’t so lucky.

Butter clam massacre!