Article body copy

One of my fondest childhood memories is of day trips with my Austrian grandmother. We’d cross the nearby Italian border and order spaghetti alle vongole—spaghetti with clams—in a favorite restaurant for lunch. I was fascinated by the little Venus clams on my plate of pasta—caught from the ocean, a world completely alien to me then—and greatly enjoyed their taste. Now, about 40 years later, I often scuba dive between rows of giant clams off the coast of the island of Luzon in the northern Philippines, about 10 hours by road north of the capital of Manila. Each clam is more than 10,000 times the size of the vongole I enjoyed decades ago. Four species of giant clams are bred here and raised in an ocean nursery by my colleagues at the University of the Philippines in an effort to restock the bivalves, whose wild populations are perilously low. Though it is currently illegal to harvest giant clams, places such as the Philippines and other countries in Southeast Asia, where human populations are large and people get a significant amount of their protein from the ocean, are especially dangerous for such immobile giants.

A reef assessment done in the 1970s showed that giant clams were close to becoming locally extinct in the Philippines due to poaching, overharvesting, and habitat destruction. As a response, in the mid-80s University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute founding director Edgardo Gomez imported clam larvae from the Solomon Islands and Palau. Gomez and his colleagues then reared the clams at the university’s marine lab in the coastal municipality of Bolinao on the west coast of Luzon. From there, the scientists relocated the juvenile clams to different parts of the archipelago. These efforts, spanning more than 30 years, have been successful due to the enthusiastic work of young Filipino marine biologists. Where clam populations had been completely depleted in the wild, they now have been replanted. In an age of constant bad news about the state of the environment, the re-establishment of giant clams in the Philippines is a welcome environmental success story.