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?

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.