![]() ![]() Even with the recent climate of economic crisis in Asia, the best geoducks wholesale for $6 or $7 a pound. By the late 1980s, wholesale geoduck prices hit $8 and $10 a pound, geoducks were being sold in Asian restaurants for three times that, and divers were using high-pressure air hoses to blast geoducks free of bottom mud, the giant clams floating up like veritable $50 bills. And it could be air-freighted to a continent newly flush with money. Mediocre in chowder, it was actually quite good as sashimi. thing, of incredible longevity, with a certain. Then Washington King Clam of Tacoma began marketing them in Asia and by 1980 accounted for 95 percent of the geoduck harvest. The who initially were chowder companies, which paid as little as 10 cents a pound. (DNR is caretaker for Washington's underwater lands.) Then the two agencies did what states do when they discover a new resource: wondered who they could sell it to. ![]() The state Fisheries Department (now Fish and Wildlife) confirmed the discovery and the Department of Natural Resources claimed ownership on the grounds that geoducks were buried in its mud. Adult clams can congregate in densities as thick as one geoduck every two square feet. In the mid-1960s a Navy diver from Keyport named Bob Sheats, looking for a wayward test torpedo near Bainbridge island, realized that Puget Sound's muck below the low-tide line was a veritable forest of jutting, gulping, spewing, and utterly un-self-conscious geoduck necks. Most Northwesterners - having learned just how hard it is to dig out a gigantic clam buried two to three feet deep in mud or sand, under water - are content simply to laugh at it.īut not all, thanks to the Cold War. The Evergreen State College in Olympia, being Evergreen, chose the geoduck as its mascot and adopted the motto Omni Extaris, Latin for "Let it all hang out." There's a granite sculpture of a geoduck in the gym lobby that Athletic Director Pete Steilberg describes as "somewhat phallic" and an official "Fighting Geoducks" fight song: "Go, geoduck, go, siphon high, siphon low. He doesn't know Donald and he doesn't go quack,ĭigga duck, digga duck, digga digga gooey duck. Well, he hasn't got a front and he hasn't got a back, UNTIL RELATIVELY RECENTLY, much of what we knew about geoducks was summed up by "The Gooey Duck Song," a hymn to bivalves penned by Ron Konzak and Jerry Elfendahl: Īnd therein lies our fondness for the beast. Because a geoduck looks like - that is to say it sort of resembles - what we mean here is that it has evolved into a shape reminiscent of. They actually tend to gasp, snigger, gulp, snort and smirk. That's more giant clams than there are people in the United States.Īnd size matters because despite the geoduck's taste, abundance and economic importance, it is the appearance of the geoduck that produces a certain kind of. There are probably 300 million to 400 million adult geoducks in Washington total, estimated Ron Teissere, geoduck manager for the state Department of Natural Resources. That doesn't count the clams in shallow or deep water (geoducks grow from the tide zone to depths of at least 350 feet). There are an estimated 130 million geoduck clams of adult size (about 2 pounds or bigger) in what the state defines as its harvest zone - water between 18 and 70 feet deep. ![]() "If you had a pile of all the salmon, and all the seals, and all the orca whales, and all the everything, the geoduck pile would be the biggest," he explained. Size matters, says Port Townsend naturalist David George Gordon, author of "Field Guide to the Geoduck" (Sasquatch, $6.95), because the flesh and shells of geoducks combined make up the greatest biomass of any animal in Puget Sound. The geoduck can become an old-growth monster living more than 150 years and weighing up to 20 pounds. Size matters to Northwesterners, who get bragging rights to the world's biggest burrowing clam. It matters to Asian seafood lovers, who pay retail prices up to $30 a pound to dine on gargantuan neck of Panopea abrupta, better known by its Nisqually Indian name of "gwe-duk," or "dig-deep": the geoduck. ![]()
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