The geoduck, a burrowing clam that can outlive nearly every other animal
Pronounced gooey-duck, this Pacific clam has a shell roughly 15 to 20 centimetres long but siphons that can stretch a metre. It typically lives around 140 years, and one specimen reached 179. Its annual shell rings can be matched to calendar years, turning each clam into a record of past ocean conditions.
The geoduck ranges along the eastern North Pacific from Alaska to Baja California and is the world's largest burrowing clam, averaging about 0.7 kilograms at maturity; the heaviest verified by Washington state biologists weighed 3.70 kilograms. Its name comes from the Lushootseed word gʷidəq, whose meaning is disputed: suggestions include a word for many, one for genitals given the clam's shape, and a phrase meaning dig deep.
Buried in sediment, it draws plankton-laden water down one channel of its siphon and pushes waste out another. Few predators can reach it, though sea otters and dogfish have been seen dislodging geoducks in Alaska, and starfish nibble exposed siphons. A female may release about 5 billion eggs over her life, yet so few survive to adulthood that a harvested patch in Puget Sound takes about 39 years to recover.
The first geoduck fishery opened in 1970, when few people wanted the chewy clam. Demand from China changed that, and by 2011 geoducks were fetching over 33 US dollars a kilogram there, supporting an 80-million-dollar industry across Alaska, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. A better testing system that checks beds before harvest raised the share of clams reaching market alive from 10 percent in 2001 to 90 percent in 2007, a big deal since live clams sell for much more. The COVID-19 pandemic briefly crashed prices to about 1 dollar a pound.
Chefs prize the crunchy siphon. In China it is usually cooked in hot pot, in Korea eaten raw with chili sauce or in stews, and in Japan served as sashimi. Its phallic look has also made it a pop-culture curiosity, and The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, keeps a geoduck named Speedy as its mascot.
Source: Geoduck
