We Should All Respect the Geoduck - Seattle Met

I know what you're thinking.

No, I won't insist you drag your mind out of the gutter, because frankly everyone thinks it. The geoduck, the animal that accounts for more of Puget Sound's biomass than any other organism, perhaps Washington's most idiosyncratic animal, is phallic. It looks like the eggplant emoji; a big ol' you-know-what.

Let's all be snotty adolescents for a moment and get our snickers out now. Because compared to the Panopea generosa, we are exactly that, juveniles. Unlike the manila clam and the Pacific oyster and the farmed Atlantic salmon and the walleye and the catfish that live in Washington waters, the geoduck is as native as it comes. Even individually, they're longtimers—there are geoducks living in the sands of Puget Sound, right this moment, that were filter feeding through the Spanish American War.

The name itself has Indigenous roots—the Nisqually word gweduc means "dig deep"—and they're not particularly gooey nor ducky.

By most measures, they're mighty. Geoducks are the world's largest burrowing clam, and the first scuba surveys done in the 1960s estimated that they made up 100 million pounds of the living material in Puget Sound. The largest single individual geoduck ever weighed by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife topped eight pounds, four times the size of a hefty dungeness crab.

Every Washingtonian benefits from the geoduck, since the state itself auctions off the right to fish for them—but just try finding a plush geoduck next to the orca and salmon stuffies in a souvenir store downtown. When they pop up, it's usually as a punch line.

The geoduck is due some respect. 

The only book the Seattle Public Library holds about our king of clams, Field Guide to the Geoduck, by David George Gordon, hits a pamphlet-size 48 pages in length. And that's with a half dozen pages devoted to various relatives of the animal and a few more listing fishing office addresses.

To be fair, there's not a lot to say for an animal that can't boast a whale's grace or a salmon's epic travels. From the outside it's simply a big bivalve shell plus a big hunk of meat, including the protruding neck, though inside it does have organs that range from liver and kidney to gonads and gills.

"It's insane how big they get," says Sammy Mabe, a Suquamish tribal councilman, fisheries policy liaison, and commercial fisherman. Mabe, who stands 5-foot-11, once dug a geoduck in Agate Pass near Bainbridge Island whose neck—the long skinny part—reached from the ground to his shoulder. Their size made them valuable to Indigenous tribes who subsisted on hunting and fishing "since time immemorial," says Mabe. Cooked over the fire like salmon, or sometimes crafted into something jerky-like for travel, "one clam could feed so many people."

It's not so different today. As one of more than 20 Washington tribes with geoduck fishing rights, the Suquamish harvest geoduck that is sold to overseas markets, but a handful are bagged and left in a communal tribal freezer where any elder can take them home to make chowder. Mabe estimates half the tribal members still regularly eat it. The Suquamish may send more boats after crab, he says, but as far as income for the tribe goes, "geoduck tops all."

The name itself has Indigenous roots—the Nisqually word gweduc means "dig deep"—and they're not particularly gooey nor ducky. To understand the place the creature holds in contemporary life, consider that most Washington kids know it only from a ditty sung in elementary school choirs and around campfires. "The Gooey Duck Song," besides misspelling the noble beast's very name, rattles off everything the geoduck is not: "For he doesn't have a front and he doesn't have a back / And he doesn't know Donald, and he doesn't go quack." Few of us care what it actually is.

In the waters off the north end of the Kitsap Peninsula, a corner called Skunk Bay that sits along woody Foulweather Bluff Preserve, a diver takes a big stride off the deck of the Skookum Fisher, a gillnetter now serving as a geoduck boat. Though he wears a small metal cylinder on his back, that's merely a "bail-out bottle" for emergencies; he descends 60 feet under the Sound while breathing nitrox-
enriched air through a tube connected to the surface.

Michael Boudreaux has been diving for geoduck for eight years, but before that he installed buoys underwater and worked salvage jobs for a decade. His dive helmet, yellow and round enough to suggest a Jacques Cousteau throwback, is large enough to accommodate the dreadlocks that cascade to the middle of his back; he hates to get them wet.

Once he hits the bottom, Boudreaux will work at sprinting speed while under three atmospheres of pressure for an hour and a half. "If you walked about, you'd never get any clams. You gotta run. A military crawl at an angle." Once he spots a show—a dimple that indicates a geoduck is buried in that part of the Sound floor—he moves his stinger, a small thin water jet, to blast sand away from a geoduck neck until he can feel it dislodge.

Per the laws of geoduck commercial wild harvest, divers can't feel up a clam before deciding to take it, since the animal wouldn't be able to rebury itself; no take-backs, and the Department of Natural Resources is watching. But experienced harvesters can spot a half-dozen shows ahead and remove dozens of clams in a single dive; today the Skookum Fisher will pull 677 pounds of geoduck from Puget Sound, the weigh-in supervised and recorded by DNR.

On deck, these pro divers are long past giggling at all the suggestive shapes—usually. Fishers admit that every once in a while they'll text buddies with a photo of a geoduck that's particularly eggplant emoji–ish. Mostly, they see a number.

That's what geoducks are: money. The fishers paid the state around $11 per pound to harvest, and most of those 677 pounds will be at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport by nightfall, on a plane to China by morning. There they will most likely be sold in live tanks; at their peak, in the early 2010s, they could go for around $150 per pound in China.

Most geoduck in the world comes from North America's Pacific Coast, and Washington's harvest is rivaled only by British Columbia's. Here state agencies and tribes with treaty fishing rights all jointly manage it, limiting the wild harvest to designated tracts across Puget Sound and to around 2.5 percent of the estimated geoduck present. Auctioning off its half, the state makes around $22 million per year from the wild harvest. Tee-hee all you want; the goofy geoduck is serious business, and not just the wild ones.

In seafood, "wild" is usually the watchword. The label comes with connotations, true or not, of something more pure, less artificial. But Tom Bloomfield, whose family grew oysters for five generations, says that while farmed geoduck remains lower volume than the wild harvest, it is by all measures a lot better. He's grown them since the early 2000s, about a decade after local aquaculture giant Taylor Shellfish was doing its first pilot projects with geoduck. Decades later, it means about a million pounds of geoduck a year and regional fights over which landowners have to look at their plastic pipes poking out of the water in the tidelands.

Wild geoduck can be of any age and must be dug out far underwater; farmed geoduck is harvested when it reaches its optimal state, making it higher quality. What is that state? Well, says Bloomfield with a laugh, "how ribald is your sense of humor?"

To imagine what makes a top geoduck, he says, you can imagine what a guy would want to see in his own, er, member. "You'd want to see something that's fairly big and proportionate to the body," he says. "You don't want to see it old and wrinkled, or shriveled up." The standards are enough to rival any dating app.

Bloomfield sells his clams to Tacoma's Alaska Ice Seafoods, which handles the shipping to the market where 95 percent of the world's giant clams show up, where respect isn't lacking: China. A string of holidays there from September to February (the Mid-Autumn Festival to Chinese New Year) make it geoduck season.

There, the high price is the point. "We might think of showing off as a negative thing in our culture," says Alaska Ice president Cody Mills. "But in their culture if I buy something expensive for someone it shows I care about them. It shows you value the relationship." And then there's that phallic shape again; geoduck, as the story goes, enhances fertility. Mills thinks the younger generation of retail customers probably like it more for the cultural tradition than belief in specific properties.

But a few lucky geoduck do show up on local restaurant plates. Seattle sushi superstar Shiro Kashiba serves a geoduck appetizer, and Nishino in Madison Park used to saute it with mushrooms and aioli. At Olympia's Chelsea Farms Oyster Bar, geoduck is sliced into sashimi and piled atop lemon slices, pale and sleek.

Like any seafood served straight, it looks a little slimy. But on the palate the geoduck has a beguiling combination of softness and firmness, mild but unmistakable. It has the saltiness of an oyster but is more bitable, more crisp.

Here there's nothing funny about it. The sheer size of the delicacy, almost enough sashimi to count as an entree, is at odds with its complexity. A food this interesting and local should be a superstar, yet its fame is splintered, strong only among the Indigenous tribal members who make it into rich chowder, the Chinese diners who splurge, and the divers who spend their workdays on Puget Sound's sandy bottom.

Two hundred years ago, lobster was known as a poor man's meal, the cockroach of the sea—today it's shorthand for indulgence. Could the king clam's day be on the horizon? Perhaps. But odds are we'll never stop laughing at the geoduck, even if it finally gets its due. Call it human nature.