Muddy Waters

These ducks are flightless except when packed in bubble wrap and gel ice and air-freighted to markets around the world, especially Asia, where they sell as delicacies and alleged aphrodisiacs for as much as $100 apiece. They range from Alaska to Baja California, though they’re most prolific in Puget Sound and British Columbia. They can live for more than a century, weigh 15 pounds, and stretch their necks 39 inches through the mud. They’re geoducks (pronounced “gooeyducks”)—the largest burrowing clams in the world.

Unlike most other bivalves, the geoduck, whose name derives from a Nisqualy Indian term meaning “dig deep,” can’t fit inside its shell (that’s why it has to dig deep). Touch the “neck” (siphon) when it shows during an extra-low tide and it voids a robust stream of seawater at you as it shrivels. Moreover, when you dig up a geoduck (a major undertaking) the long, fleshy neck dangles obscenely, confronting even the purest mind with an inescapable vision of a human phallus and thereby creating much of the demand in China and Japan, where they’re eaten cooked or as sushi.

In the United States, however, where the resemblance of organisms to human body parts has not impressed since liverwort was being prescribed for cirrhosis, the media and public have difficulty taking geoducks seriously. During sporting events at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, for example, a student prances around in an outlandish geoduck outfit while fans sing the school’s fight song: Go, Geoducks, go/Through the mud and the sand, let’s go./Siphon high, squirt it out/swivel all about/let it all hang out.

Yet there is nothing laughable about the vicious battle under way between property owners along south Puget Sound and the booming, 14-year-old geoduck aquaculture industry. The president of the Coalition to Protect Puget Sound Habitat, Laura Hendricks—seen by both sides as the Genghis Kahn of anti-geoduck insurgents—tells me she gets death threats by phone and in person, that she’s been run off the road, and that someone cut her car’s brake lines.

And this from Bruce Wishart, a member of the multi-stakeholder Shellfish Aquaculture Regulatory Committee, set up by the state legislature in 2007, and policy director of People for Puget Sound: “I go to all these meetings, and I’m continuously amazed at the animosity on both sides. I’ve been on countless advisory committees over the last 25 years. This is my life. And I have never seen this level of anger and polarization.”

For the most part, mainstream environmental groups don’t oppose geoduck farming per se, and they’re not fighting with the industry. They’re just worried about possible dangers to fish and wildlife and are pushing for decent science and reasonable regulations. “This is not a classic good guys versus bad guys confrontation,” says Paul Sparks, conservation vice president for the Washington council of Trout Unlimited. “The shellfish folks perceive themselves as responsible environmentalists, and in many ways they are.”

But no one knows what geoduck farming is doing to near-shore ecosystems, and the demand has created a gold-rush atmosphere that will result in major expansion of the $80 million industry in Washington and British Columbia. Bryan Flint, director of the Tahoma Audubon Society, which favors a moratorium on geoduck farming until there are peer-reviewed studies of its effects, told me this: “It’s like the wild, wild West or the 1800s with logging. Here’s a new agriculture that has no rules. It has been open game for them—go do it. Our history in the Northwest is that we’ve just cut the trees and farmed the fish, and 50 years later we start to realize the damage we’ve done.”

I began to perceive the conflict’s intensity when I stopped by the house of Tom and Anita Woodnutt on Puget Sound’s Totten Inlet, where I was greeted by 13 outraged shoreline residents, all trying not to interrupt one another as they plied me with horror stories about what Taylor Shellfish Farms, the biggest shellfish grower on the West Coast, was doing here. Under early afternoon sunlight we walked the windless beach. The tide was up, so I couldn’t see the geoduck beds.

Oysters, mussels, and sundry steamer clams can protect themselves from predators and stay moist during low tides by sealing themselves into their shells. But because geoducks let it all hang out, as the song goes, they opt for deeper water, sometimes to depths of 360 feet. Without scuba gear you can’t dig wild ones except on extreme low tides and then not many. To facilitate harvest the aquaculture industry plants geoducks in the intertidal zone (between extreme high and extreme low tides)—where they are vulnerable to predation. So seedlings must be planted inside sections of PVC pipe that are jammed into the mud and covered with protective netting. The pipes—about 35,000 per acre—are unsightly, and storms dislodge them and scatter them around the beach.

Moreover, because geoducks aren’t able to fit into their shells they’re obliged to bury themselves deeper than other clams. So they can’t just be raked; instead aquaculturists have to liquefy the surrounding substrate with water from a high-volume hose, disrupting the centuries-old layering of sediments and basically “turning the beach upside down,” as critics like to say. It can’t be good for the delicate and complex web of life that abounds in the top few feet and that sustains species far beyond the intertidal zone, such as fish and shorebirds.