Kodiak tribal groups take stock of popular subsistence resource

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Kodiak tribal organizations are looking at how many clams are nestled in local beaches. Shellfish are a popular subsistence food on the island, and the Sun’aq Tribe, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, and the Kodiak Area Native Association are surveying the density of the local resource.

This week, they conducted a clam biomass survey at Mission Beach, a popular harvest ground in the City of Kodiak.

According to the Sun’aq Tribe, it’s the first time a survey of this type has been done, and they’re in the first year of a two-year grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A group of about eight people dig into plots of wet sand marked with flags and scattered randomly along the beach at low tide.

“We’ve got a live one. Oh, baby cockle.”

KANA Regional Environmental Coordinator, Stephanie Mason, holds up the shellfish, and then she measures it

“That was 35 millimeters.”

And returns it to the sand.

“That way it has a chance of living and growing big.”

At this point, she says, they’re mostly finding smaller shellfish. The sample plots should give them a good idea of how many clams are on the beach. That’s according to Tom Lance with the Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak.

He’s says they’re targeting butter clams, cockles, and littlenecks.

“And we’ll come out here some years from now and we’ll see how many clams are here in our sample area and use that a relative indicator of whether they’re increasing or decreasing.”

Lance says if they see a decreasing number of shellfish over a few years, it could indicate overharvesting, predation, or the effect of global warming, but he says that’s not a primary focus at this point of the survey. They’re just getting a baseline.

And beyond the scope of this current study is another concern. Lance says Kodiak shellfish also carry a higher risk of paralytic shellfish poisoning.

“And so people need to be very careful when they eat shellfish… they’re taking a big risk.”

He says clams remain a pretty popular food in Kodiak communities.

“People have different ways of preparing them, but there’s no real sure way of cleaning PSP, especially from butter clams, which can retain PSP, paralytic shellfish poisoning –  the saxitoxin, or the versions of saxitoxin, there’s several versions of it – they can retain ‘em up to two years, whereas mussels, they’ll purge out toxins rather quickly.”

He says there’s no regular on-site testing of PSP because shellfish harvest on Kodiak beaches is subsistence, which it’s not required by regulation to be monitored.

But he says Alaska Sea Grant is working together with NOAA to develop a new instrument for monitoring PSP.