Saving Seafood

MAINE: After Last Year’s Poor Harvest, Mainers Work To Help Clam Fisheries Bounce Back

August 9th, 2019 — Last year Maine’s harvest of soft-shell clams was one of the worst in many decades, down to around 7 million pounds. That’s due in part to closures of polluted flats, and predation by the invasive green crab.

But harvesters and other observers say the fishery can bounce back — and new efforts to better protect the resource are emerging in more than a dozen coastal towns.

The Medomak River is Maine’s most prolific softshell clam fishery, and Glen Melvin has been picking them from the mudflats here, off and on, for more than four decades. Steering a beat-up aluminum outboard downstream from Waldoboro, Melvin sports a multi-colored bandana and mirrored sunglasses.

The boat flies past cove after cove, which in recent years have been frequently shut down to clamming because of pollution by fecal coliform.

Read the full story at Maine Public Radio

How Maine can save its historic clamming industry

May 15, 2018 — Maine’s clamming industry, typically the second or third most economically important marine resource, saw landings fall to an 87-year low in 2017. Commercial harvests dropped 39 percent and 66 percent over the past five and 35 years, respectively. Today, about 1,500 state-licensed clammers ply their trade in the soft-bottom intertidal zone whereas in 1973 that number was nearly 5,925. This decline should worry coastal communities from Kittery to Lubec.

Though we possess different perspectives and experiences, we are united in our concern for the future of Maine’s clamming industry. We joined forces on the flats in northern Casco Bay to better understand the nature of the clam decline. Since 2013, we have worked together, along with other clammers, research technicians and students, to conduct 27 experiments at 78 intertidal sites, and analyzed the contents of more than 34 tons of intertidal sediments. Some of our findings were recently published in the Journal of Shellfish Research.

While many threats to soft-shell clam populations exist, such as disease, pollution, red tide, coastal acidification, our studies showed that predators — both invasive and native — are the major cause of recent declines in this fishery, and furthermore, that no significant relationship exists between harvesting and the amount of juvenile clams under 1-year-old. Instead, we have learned that the health of the clam population is determined very early in a clam’s life history.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News