Ryan Drum's Beach Talk, July 14, 2007 · 17 July 2007, 13:58 by Julie Loyd
I’ve posted about half of the notes I took so far. Stay tuned for the rest of them.
We met at 9:30 and left around noon. Low tide was 11:50 ish. Last week was a record-breaking heat wave but today was chilly in the shade, with scattered clouds overhead and a mist rising from the tide flats.
Ryan led us down the Cook’s driveway to the the rocky spurs. At the sand’s edge was beach rocket, a salt tolerant plant. It’s edible, and tastes a bit like mustard because of its sulfur content (which also makes garlic so pungent).
A nearby plant that grows a bit higher on the sand is orach. It’s also edible, and looks pretty much exactly like lamb’s quarter. It’s in the beet family.
Lathyrus, or beach pea, has tasty peas but DO NOT EAT THEM. They contain a bioaccumulating toxin that acumulates over a lifetime, similar to that in fava beans. If you ate enough as a kid, then maybe just a few eaten when you’re older will make you keel over. Quote of the day: “The meter starts ticking with the first pea. Sounds like a diaper service.”
Here at Cooks’ Beach in winter at low tide, the war resisters used to build a huge fire and go clamming. It was so cold, the kids would be crying but the adults would be out with their shovels. They’d have clam chowder at 2 a.m.
We looked at the green velvety moss below the barnacle line, forming a biofilm that changes the local environment. You could see where limpets were stopped by the presence of the biofilm.
Above the barnacles was nori. The gel in nori is called orphirin.
Along the barnacle stripe itself, some were missing but had left little white spots. They were probably eaten by sea stars, which send out their stomach parts to digest them. A fucus plant might attach to a barnacle scar, but if the scar erodes, the fucus washes away.
Inside the barnacles was a biofilm of black “tar,” the crustose phase of gigartina. Gigartina also has a foliose phase. The tar patches persist for thousands of years and grow by the millimeter. Algae are divided into three classes, red, green, and brown. Despite its brown color, gigartina is a red alga. The live plant dries to a crisp in the sun at low tide, but reconstitutes in seconds. It’s 90% gel, or carrageenan (also known as irish moss or blancmange). You can extract the carrageenan by simmering plants for 2 to three hours. It’s good for respiratory problems. Carrageenan is a globular polymer which assimilates into the body and ends up in the mucus membranes, where it enhances the body’s ability to mobilize sputum. 4,700 years ago in China it was used as a sexual lubricant.
Sea moss was popular in the Caribbean but harvested to extinction. Mel Goldstein was researching seaweed there, and showed the natives how to string old fishnets between rocks and culture it. With that small act, he changed the local ecology. The Mayas had a traditional morning drink of seaweed gel mixed with chocolatl. You can cook chicken with it. The Arawaks and Caribs taught the Blacks about the uses. Now, it’s thought of as a virility drink and served flavored with rum and ginger. The women, children and elderly tend the plants.
Dr Louis Druehl found out that the bull whip kelp knob is filled with carbon monoxide. Why? To float it, of course, maybe to repel predators. Their tiny spores respond to stretching and grow up to 90 feet. You can put fresh kelp rings on pizza. Farmed abalones are fed on kelp squares. It’s claimed that abalones rear up, lifting their shells, and look to see if the human approaching is the one who usually feeds them. They gather at the edge of their pen if someone forgets to feed them.
Bull kelp is 14 – 18% potassium and were mined at the start of WWI for potassium nitrate for gunpowde. Our kelp, Nereocystis luetkeana, doesn’t grow back when harvested unlike Macrocystis in California. Special legislation was passed in Washington to protect the kelp.
Now we moved on to clams. To clam, crab, or gather seaweed, you need a license that can be seen by the patrol boat. Use kneepads. You are allowed seven clams per day, and you are not allowed to put them back.
You can tell where they are by the holes they make in the sand as they blow out their excreta. Anemone holes look similar, but they have an anemone in them. Each type of clam has a favorite level on the beach.
Horse clam holes often have enteromorpha growing on the tip of the clam siphon. Seaweeds like the clam because it’s a stable substrate, and clam poop is nutritious. Clams like the seaweed because it’s edible. Horse clams grow just below the depth that Dungeness crabs can grab. The crabs dig, hang on to the edge of the hole, and try to pinch the clam shell until it cracks open. Unlike razor clams, horse clams are wedged in and don’t move. They’re hermaphroditic and mate by trading gametes. Pheromones are released by the eggs and the sperm search for them. They grow to about 6 inches and then stop. There can be so many of them they occlude the beach and prevent younger ones from settling. Shellfish growers ought to disturb the beds every 3 to four years. On this beach, the horse clams are moving up the beach as they get more crowded.
Little pea crabs live in horse clams. The female is ten times bigger, with a huge underflap of roe this time of year. You can eat the roe when it’s orange or red, but not when it’s grey. The male is transient, and crawls out the excretory port of the siphon to look for a new horse clam pea crab. The clams have evolved a special pouch to house the crabs.
The black on the clam shells is caused by iron sulfide. On a horse clam, the size of the ridges show response to changes in temperature, nutrients, and so on. Under a microscope, you can see the imprint of daily tides. By looking at fossil clams, they can show that the earth is slowing down with respect to the moon.
Butter clams are less brittle and thus can live in half the depth. Unlike horse clams, if they overpopulate they simply crowd together rather than changing the depth that they live at.
John Harper is a pilot who, while doing aerial surveys, noticed that some beaches in Canada and Alaska seem to be terraced. Native informants told him, “Everybody knows those are clam gardens.” They’re at the zero tide line where the butterclams are at their maximum. Butterclams are light sensitive while horse clams aren’t.
The best way to tell whether it’s a red tide? Don’t bother calling the red tide hotline at 1-800-562-5632. Instead, use the traditional time-honored method and get a Lummi slave to eat a clam. Ask them if they feel numbness on their upper lip, watch carefully to see if they keel over. If you would like to re-use your slave, the bark of Hooker’s willow or Scouler’s willow are native antidotes. However, no whites who tried this antidote have survived.
To prepare clams, soak 12 hours in a bucket of seawater. This cleanses their stomach, but doesn’t address the sand they may have grabbed on to while you dug at them. That sand isn’t in the digestive tract, and you have to manually remove it. John Roach cuts the stomach open and washes the sand out to save the 12 hours, but Ryan thinks that’s a travesty because you lose the yummy seaweed that’s also in the stomach. Your call.
Janet advises freezing the clams, which tenderizes them.
Abalones used to cover Skipjack island’s rock shore. They were extirpated by the urchin divers, who made $1000 per day diving and moonlighted by collecting abalone at $100 per pound. One guy bought a boat he called Abalone Made.
commenting closed for this article
Fire Fighting July 16, 2007 with Josh and Carson Juvenile Salmon Netting Tests at Cowlitz with Tina Wyllie-Echeverria, July 21, 2007