“And right now there are holes that you can drive a semi-truck through.”Īfter five hours of spot checking the towers of white boxes labeled “Live seafood”, Olson realizes they’re out of time. “People are going to take advantage of the holes in the system,” Olson says. But many in the farmed shellfish industry have balked at the idea of an electronic system, saying it would be cost-prohibitive for their businesses. A system like that, he says, would make it more difficult to cheat. Olson says a more sophisticated electronic shellfish tracking system would allow his team to scan a barcode to see exactly who harvested the shellfish and from where. If I can’t confirm certain pieces of information right now before that product is shipped to China, then I’ve got to let it go.” I’m not going to stop something just because I have a hunch. “If you hold up (a shipment), and it misses its flight and gets spoiled, our department is on the hook,” Olson says. ">fast geoduck from user9741466">KUOW 949 on Vimeo. It’s a race against the clock, and all the checking - each box, each certification tag - must be done by hand. When Olson’s team arrives at SeaTac one evening, hundreds of these boxes are already waiting. Olson takes his entire five-officer detachment to conduct airport inspections. It’s a bottleneck and most of the seafood is geoduck packed with gel ice in plastic foam containers.Ī geoduck harvested illegally from Puget Sound in the afternoon could be on a plane that evening, leaving only a few hours for enforcement officers to get involved. On any given night, tons of fresh seafood pass through Sea-Tac. Or they dive in the middle of the night in secluded coves where there’s little chance of being caught.įor all the challenges of catching people selling illegal shellfish to customers right here in Washington, there’s another challenge: Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Sometimes they hide their bounty in the hulls of their boats. Poachers have been known to leave bags of geoduck clams on the seafloor to retrieve later. And they’ve also seen signs of poaching - the sandy bottom is pock-marked by recent digs, and bright white fragments of geoduck shells litter the seafloor. But in recent years, they’ve seen numbers staying the same or continuing to fall. Normally they would see geoduck numbers increasing. The state divers return to geoduck beds about every 10 years to check on how the population is recovering. But even given that, we still see signs of illegal harvest,” Sizemore says. “Our ability to detect (poaching) is pretty low. They dive 150 times per year, but they’re only able to visit about 3 percent of the geoduck harvest areas. In addition to studying geoducks in the lab, Sizemore’s team of five divers check on geoduck beds in Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. “In 10 years, you would wipe out the population.” “Ten percent sounds like a pretty low number, but for a very long-lived animal with very low natural mortality, 10 percent is huge,” Sizemore says. That’s why the total allowable harvest rate is 2.7 percent - anything higher would not be sustainable. But each time a geoduck bed is harvested, it takes about 40 years for the population there to recover. Puget Sound has hundreds of millions of geoducks, a seemingly endless supply. “So you need to be very careful with the harvest rate.” “If you cut down a forest, it takes a very long time to come back,” Sizemore says. These slow-growing, long-lived clams have been called Puget Sound’s old-growth trees. And that information helps Sizemore’s team decide how many can safely be harvested. They were alive when Abraham Lincoln was president.” “They have rings that you can count, just like a tree,” says Bob Sizemore, turning a hard white shell over in his hands. They cut cross-sections and look at them under a microscope to determine how old they are and what kind of a life they’ve had. That’s in part, officials say, because of the ongoing scientific research that informs the harvest limit.įrom a fish and wildlife lab in Olympia, Sizemore and his team study geoducks by analyzing their shells. Despite the black-market pressure, Washington’s wild geoduck fishery has been called one of the best-managed fisheries in the world.
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