Small Clams Court

Pounding surf, dive-bombing birds and howling wind hardly seem a safe environment for a nursery, but Ventura County beaches have become a crib for a clam comeback the likes of which hasn’t been seen in years, scientists say.

A fortuitous alignment of environmental conditions is leading to a clam population explosion. Go to the right beach at low tide, turn a spadeful of wet sand and odds are you will uncover dozens of the bottom-hugging sea creatures.

Itty-bitty bean clams protrude by the thousands from sloping tidal flats at Hollywood Beach. Masses of mollusks are turning up at Ormond, McGrath and Point Mugu.

At La Conchita, game wardens have cited people poaching Pismo clams, which grow to the size of softballs and have been a coveted seafood treat since the days Chumash Indians combed the coast. Divers are hauling in husky clams, too, along a sunken sand bar just off Port Hueneme.

“There’s lots of clams out there. It’s my favorite place,” said Dale Sheckler, editor of California Diving News, who frequents Silver Strand beach in search of big Pismos.

For now, most of the clams on the beach are small, but there are some bruisers if you have the patience to hunt diligently for them. If the undersized clams are left alone, they will build body mass that makes them more edible, and that should lead to a bonanza for clam hunters in the months and years ahead, scientists say.

“We’ve had another good year of recruitment for juvenile clams,” said Ian Taniguchi, marine biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game. “It looks like Pismo clams as a population are rebounding nicely. They are in the initial stages of recovery.”

Clams have always run in boom-and-bust cycles along the Central Coast. Indian scrap piles on the Channel Islands and elsewhere show thousands were consumed in some years and none in others. Protected only by a thin layer of sand and water, they are vulnerable to a variety of threats, including sea gulls, human gatherers, temperature fluctuations, storms, pollution and sand sharks.

It was Miss Piggy who once protested, “I simply cannot imagine why anyone would eat something slimy served on an ashtray,” but, unfortunately for the clams, that sentiment was not widely shared. Anybody fit enough to poke around in the sand could scoop up scores of Pismo clams with little effort. A century ago, they were harvested with little regard to the future.

Pismo Beach, namesake for the thick-shelled clam most coveted on the Central Coast, became a killing field. Farmers used their plows to push clams out of the sand. During one 10-week period, 4 million clams were harvested along a four-mile stretch of that beach. In the late 1940s, 150,000 clam diggers gathered 34 tons of clams on a single weekend, said Jenifer Dugan, biologist at the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara.

Clams live about 20 years, their beige shells grow rings like trees, and they can reach 7 inches in length. Though Pismo clams start breeding when they reach the size of a penny and adults produce billions of larvae, just 1% of the young survive to adults--and that was not enough to replenish the numbers being harvested.

Clam populations were so decimated that the state’s commercial fishery closed and sportfishing limits, which stood at 200 in 1911, have been reduced to 10 today.

“They were sort of strip mined by recreational fishing,” Dugan said. “They used to be incredibly abundant, compared to what we have now.”

Nature added to their demise. Sea otters are rapacious clam predators--a single otter once was seen eating 24 clams in less than three hours--and can consume up to 80 clams a day. Otters were largely to blame for the collapse of clam sportfishing at Pismo Beach between 1978 and 1983, Dugan said.

Then came El Nino storms, beginning in 1982. Scientists say warm waters, fluctuating currents and shell-crushing surf destroyed remaining clam populations along the coast. Subsequent El Nino conditions in the early 1990s contributed to the decline of clams, although some of them moved into deeper water out of reach of humans, Taniguchi said.

Conditions Favor Clam Resurgence

Scott Shoemaker, a 42-year-old former lifeguard from Silver Strand, remembers going clamming as a boy.

“They used to be everywhere. Families would come out and dig them out of the sand. It was real popular,” he said.

Today, in recent walks along the shore during extreme low tides, Shoemaker has seen sand flats contain so many Pismo clams they look like they have been planted like a garden, he said. Walking through shin-deep water near Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, he stuck his hand into the sand and pulled out a Pismo clam that would have made a delicious meal, had he not put it back.

“It’s really cool to see these guys coming back,” he said.

For reasons not entirely understood, ocean conditions along Ventura County have favored clams in recent years. The area has long stretches of gently sloping beaches without the otters and divers found to the north and south. In a 1996 survey of county beaches, researchers found an average of 450 clams per square meter of beach at Ormond and up to 800 per meter along the Rincon, Dugan said.

“There’s more there than people think. At some of these beaches, they may be more in the surf zone and cannot be seen as easily,” he said.

But word is getting out, and that is leading to the kind of illegal harvesting that imperiled clams in the first place.

In the last three months, five divers have been cited for collecting too many Pismo clams off the Ventura County coast, said state game Warden Jorge Gross. Sometimes poachers go out at night, which is illegal, using red-tinted lights affixed to helmets, to keep from being seen at a distance, he said.

On the Fourth of July, Gross cited two men from Los Angeles allegedly in possession of 1,692 undersized Pismo clams at a beach near La Conchita.

“‘Whew! That was more than for just a barbecue,” said Jeff Alexander, a member of the Ventura County Fish and Game Commission.

The cases have been referred to the county district attorney’s office for prosecution. Illegal clam fishing is a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum fine of $2,000 and up to one year in jail.

The legal way to take clams requires that anyone older than 16 possess a fishing license and a measuring device. Only 10 Pismo clams 4 inches or more can be kept a day, and the rest must be put back into the sand where they were found. Clams, which filter as much as 60 liters of water a day to strain plankton and bits of plants, animals and algae, must remain in the tidal zone. Clam digging is permitted year-round, but can be done only during daylight hours.

“Before you grab your pitchforks and start digging in the sand, learn the laws,” Shoemaker said. “That’s the ethical and responsible use of this sportfishing resource.”

va,.1 There are no health advisories in place for clams along the Ventura County coast, although a summer-long quarantine on mussels from Southern California is in effect, said Glenn Takeoka, chief of the environmental health services section for the state Department of Health Services.

A health advisory went into effect Friday for clams and other shellfish taken from the San Luis Obispo County coast because of algal toxins in the water. Officials advise against harvesting clams in places where red tides are evident.

For the latest shellfish advisories, call (800) 553-4133.