4, area waterfront owners and other concerned citizens viewed slides and heard testimony from waterfront owners in Totten Inlet in Thurston and Mason counties. What permanent damage is done to organisms when harvesters implode the beach is unknown what potentially harmful organisms (cysts, eggs and bacteria, all alive but dormant), long buried deep in substrate mud, are released into the water column are also unknown.Īt a standing room only community meeting in Rosedale on Oct.
After growing five or six years, requiring nutrition and expelling waste, they will be harvested at one time (over several days or weeks of “sweeps” of the bed by water jet hoses). In one of two Key Peninsula farming applications (SD 53-05) scheduled for final hearings in late October, 30,000 square feet of private intertidal-zone tidelands would be planted with an equal number of PVC tubes, resulting in a minimum concentration of 90,000 geoducks on a little over one-half acre of tidelands. Monoculture farms consist of PVC tubes pushed into the mud every square foot of the planting area, into which are dropped at least three paper-clip sized geoducks. Wild geoducks occupy “beds” that contain multigenerations of the clam, and compatible organisms: worms, mollusks, anemones and protozoa. Controversy over the aesthetics of the practice and environmental impact of concentrated monoculture planting have resulted in formal hearings, lawsuits, formation of opposition groups, industry public-relations efforts, and a Pierce County Council resolution requiring a study of the practice. About 10 years ago, when commercial shellfish growers discovered lucrative markets for geoduck in Asia, this homely clam, and both the public and private tidelands where it is found, became the equivalent of a present-day Gold Rush.Ĭommercial geoduck farms either already operational or pending, with more sure to follow, are changing Puget Sound shorelines. A distinctively unattractive clam, its siphon overflows its shell the many decades of its natural lifespan are lived several feet down in tidal mud. Deep-water-harvested by commercial divers since before statehood, hunted and dug recreationally at extreme low tide by local seafood enthusiasts, geoduck (pronounced “gooey-duck”) are the largest of the clam species, and native to inland waters of the Pacific Northwest northward to Canada.
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