March 2012
Checking Lake Whatcom for Invasive Asian Clams
by the Editor
Editor’s Note: This is a brief squib about a program I became aware of by chance while running my dog at Bloedel Donovan. We plan to provide more updates as available.
I met two divers emerging from a dive in Lake Whatcom at the Bloedel Donovan boat launch February 29th. It turns out they were from the State Department of Fish and Wildlife on the first day of a survey of the extent invasive asian clams, Corbicula fluminea, have become established in Lake Whatcom. Our conversation was brief, in consideration of their understandable desire to get warm and homeward bound out of the freezing rain falling at the time, but informative. They told me they were working with the City of Bellingham, providing technical assistance to survey the bottom of all three basins (without charging a fee I was pleased to learn).
They had dived to the bottom of the northern basin, where no light penetrated and the bottom was mucky, ninety-five feet down. However, “critters were present,” which means the anoxic area must be seasonal. They had not seen any asian clams, also known as Golden Clams, or even the Prosperity Clam or Good Luck Clam in Southeast Asia. Apparently, the golden clam is commonly available as an aquarium filter-feeder (quite cheap — I found them for $1.25 online), so perhaps the Lake Whatcom population’s arrival vector could be via aquariasts, or boat bilgewater. They live in sandy or muddy bottoms, filter-feeding on algae. They out-compete native clams, and are well-established in many areas of North America. (Apparently they are also delicious, according to several recipes I found online, including asian clams with mussels in a black bean sauce.) They are exceptionally fertile (self-fertile, producing both eggs and sperm), producing up to two thousand live young at a time, and up to one-hundred thousand young in a lifetime! So I guess the good news is if they haven’t over-run the whole lake, something must be eating them!
More on this Lake Whatcom invasive species survey as results become available.
