The Evergreen State College Shellfish Garden

Now growing at the Evergreen Beach

Author: Dr. Pauline C. Yu

Member of Faculty at The Evergreen State College. Larval biologist, queer feminist academic, occasional dilettante artist and crafter

Spring 2021

April 10, 2021 /

We have a new group of students this quarter stewarding the growth of the shellfish. We had our first work party and the first zoom seminar this quarter, and we’re using Discord (“fun Slack”) for communications. The oysters got sampled at our first work party: “tastes like snorkeling”. They’re still pretty petite, but they are getting towards snack size.

The low tides are in the afternoons now, so we’re getting to hike through the Evergreen trails to get to the beach. The trillium (Trillium ovatum) is in bloom and the currants (Ribes sanguineum) and thimbleberries (Rubus parviflorus) are leafing out. There will be two really excellent low tides (full moons) coming up in the end of April/early May and in the end of May.

Clam Gardens

April 10, 2021 /

Pacific Northwest tribal nations have a long history of modifying mudflats to optimize the yield of multiple species of clams in the intertidal. The Clam Garden network is an active collaboration between tribal nations, resource managers, researchers and academics that is international and inter-agency, to promote the restoration, research and development of clam gardens based on traditional indigenous knowledge. In our student course, we have been reading this excellent paper about the archaeological study of butter clam (Saxidomus gigantea) consumption:

11,500 y of human–clam relationships provide long-term context for intertidal management in the Salish Sea, British Columbia

Ginevra Toniello, Dana Lepofsky, Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky, Anne K. Salomon, Kirsten Rowell

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Oct 2019, 116 (44) 22106-22114; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1905921116

Biodiversity at the Evergreen Beach

February 1, 2021 /

At the beach during low tide this winter, we have been fortunate to encounter a handful of visitors and residents at the shellfish garden. One night we saw a medium sized pink star Pisaster brevispinis, two medium plumose sea anemones Metridium senile, and an unidentified goby that snuck into one of the oyster bags but couldn’t get out. (We had to free the goby so that it would not perish trapped in the bag, but it also was mildly traumatized by the extraction and handling.) The most recent night we found a generously sized horse (fat gaper) clam Tresus capax that had emerged from the sand. I must admit I probably did not rebury it sufficiently deeply when I reburied it; like geoducks, these clams are unable to rebury themselves as adults. Evergreen students frequently mistake them for our school mascot when they encounter them at the beach, as these clams also have a large siphon that protrudes from the shell through a wide gap. When we get a chance to sample under the clam netting later in the year, we’ll undoubtedly find some more.

Winter Quarter 2021

January 14, 2021 /

We started off Winter Quarter 2021 with new students joining our group to learn about shellfish, food sustainability and intertidal ecology. We are continuing to steward the growth of the oysters–they’re definitely larger, approaching 5-6 cm in height, and developing some cup-shaping to them. We’ve also added a seminar component to our group learning, with regular Zoom meetings when we’re not at the beach.

Last fall, I had a conversation with Makenna and Emily Wilder online about the mission of the Evergreen Shellfish Garden as part of the 2020-2021 Climate Academy Lecture Series. And this quarter, I am adding a conversation with other shellfish researchers in the Pacific Northwest to discuss the ways in which research and management are working for Native American tribal shellfish operations, for ensuring food sovereignty and climate resilience.

Shellfish in the time of Coronavirus

July 18, 2020 /

The pandemic has forced everyone to modify how they work and the shellfish garden has been no different. It’s been trickier to coordinate, it’s imposed a number of additional safety protocols, but it has forced us to be more organized, which is ultimately going to benefit the shellfish. The shellfish themselves are having a grand old time–fewer people on the beach to disturb them, a mild summer thus far (thus less heat stress on the beach), and having two PhDs, an industry professional, a 3rd generation farmer and others fretting over their well being.

We’re still gathering ourselves mentally, gathering our resources, getting organized and finally gathering as a small group in person for the first time in months. It will be a chance to catch some sunshine, get mud under our fingernails and smell the salt air (and the sulfurous mud) while we discuss bringing this project from plan into the reality of fostering our new little oyster children. Totally like the Walrus and the Carpenter…

Illustration by John Tenniel (1871) from Through the Looking Glass. Note he would have been depicting the European flat oyster, Ostrea edulis, not the introduced Asian Pacific oysters that we will be seeding.

About Pauline

May 27, 2020 /

Faculty Member Dr. Pauline C. Yu is administering this blog site and administering the re-seeding of the Evergreen Shellfish Garden in Summer of 2020. She has a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Southern California and a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her interests are larval ecophysiology, aquaculture, material culture of marine invertebrates, gender studies, philosophy of biology and art. She has been teaching at The Evergreen State College since 2014.

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The Evergreen State College
Olympia, Washington

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