Field Notes
Shellfish Info
The rules that apply everywhere — biotoxin closures, tides, licenses, and whose beach it is.
Shellfish Info
The Clam That Stays Toxic a Year After the Water Clears
Butter clams sequester saxitoxin in their siphon tissue and hold it for a year or more after the bloom has passed. That is why Washington closure notices name species rather than just beaches, and why a beach open for Manilas is not automatically open for butter clams.
Shellfish Info
Do Not Kill the Green Crab You Think You Found
The advice you have heard is to catch invasive green crabs and eat them. In Washington that is wrong: it is illegal to possess a live one, and the state is specifically not asking the public to kill them, because native crabs are misidentified constantly.
Shellfish Info
There Is No Such Thing as a Shellfish License
In Maine the town issues it. In Rhode Island a resident does not need one. In Oregon a twelve-year-old does. And in Washington, holding the license does not tell you whether the beach under your feet is public. Fifty arrangements that share a name.
Shellfish Info
Same Species, Two Bays, Two Completely Different Oysters
Almost every named west coast oyster is the same animal. So when two of them taste different, that difference is coming entirely from the water, the plankton, the growing method and how long the oyster spends out of the water each day.
Shellfish Info
The Months With an R Rule Is Right for the Wrong Reason
People say the R rule is about spawning. Spawning is why summer oysters taste poor. The thing that puts people in hospital is a bacterium that multiplies in warm water and does not care what the month is called.
Shellfish Info
The Oyster on Your Plate Came Over on a Steamship
Nearly every oyster eaten on this coast is a Pacific oyster from Japan, brought here largely by Japanese immigrants who knew how to farm it. They were then legislated out of owning tidelands in 1921 and imprisoned by their own government in 1942.
Shellfish Info
The Summer the Oyster Larvae Started Dying
In 2007 the larvae at a hatchery on Netarts Bay began dying by the millions and nobody could say why. The answer was the intake water, and it became the first clear case of ocean acidification shutting down a working American business.
Shellfish Info
Every Crab Rule Exists Because a Lost Pot Keeps Fishing
A pot that goes to the bottom and stays there catches crab, the crab die, the dead crab bait the pot, and it runs that cycle for years. Escape rings, rot cord and buoy markings are all answers to that, and to a fishery that fails if you take the wrong animals.
Shellfish Info
The Thirty Hours a Year When the Clams Are Reachable
Most shellfish worth digging live below the level an ordinary tide uncovers, so the whole activity depends on a handful of hours a year when the water pulls back further than usual. Reading minus tides is the difference between a season and a hobby you keep meaning to start.
Shellfish Info
Washington Sold Its Beaches, and Nobody Marked Them
In most of the United States the beach below the high tide line is public. Washington sold roughly seventy-one percent of its tidelands into private hands before stopping in 1971, and there is nothing at the waterline that tells you which kind you are standing on.
Shellfish Info
The Clams Look Fine. That Is Not Information.
Paralytic shellfish poisoning does not change how a clam looks, smells or tastes, and cooking does not destroy it. Three toxins, three action levels, and a closure system that shuts a beach in an afternoon and takes a week and a half to reopen it.