Giving Compass' Take:

• Hannah Weinberger explains that tribe members and scientists are working together to grow cockle clams the Puget Sound Restoration Fund hatchery to revive the Puget Sound population. 

• How can funders support efforts to restore traditional food sources? 

• Learn about the impact of climate change on clam populations in Maine. 

When Suquamish tribal member Robin Sigo returned home from college in 1998, the cockles weren’t there to greet her.

“When I was younger there used to be a lot more,” she says of the softball-sized clams. Her family would camp and attend large clam-and-cockle bakes at Doe’Kag-Wats — a marsh also called Jefferson Head, by a large saltwater estuary near Indianola — where her dad would ask her to do the cockle dance, which required two cockles.

Sigo is worried about the Salish Sea and her disappearing culture — which includes her tribe’s access to the traditional foods they rely on.

Tribal shellfish biologist Elizabeth Unsell says many tribal members have noticed declines over the decades.

“We don’t have data to support that locally, but our recent data do not show a high abundance of cockles on beaches where traditionally there was,” she says. “We want to be able to seed cockles onto traditional cockle beaches in order to increase subsistence access to cockles for tribal members.”

So in 2016, Unsell approached the Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF) about what to do.

The fund specializes in rearing native species in hatcheries, and hatchery research manager Ryan Crim suggested bringing cockle broodstock to PSRF’s hatchery operation at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Manchester research station, to experiment with spawning and rearing.

While PSRF and Unsell experimented with spawning in 2017 and 2018, the Suquamish Tribal Council eventually put up between $10,000 and $20,000, Sigo says, in late 2018 to jump-start the project.

“It’s not that much money for the possibility of having this traditional food back in our lives on a regular basis,” says Sigo, currently the Suquamish Tribal Council treasurer.

Whether cockles are decreasing throughout the Salish Sea area and need restoration remain unknown.

Read the full article about increasing the clam population by Hannah Weinberger at The New Food Economy.