GEORGETOWN

E xplorers of all ages set out across Reid State Park’s clam flats on Thursday with Georgetown’s municipal shellfish warden to learn about the life cycle of the soft-shell clam, the local clam industry and to dig some of the tasty morsels for themselves.

Hosted by the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust, dozens of participants in the annual event formed a circle around warden Jon Hentz as he demonstrated how to locate and dig the soft-shelled mollusks found across the coast’s expansive sand and mud flats.

“The important thing when you’re after softshell clams is to dig just to your side of the clam’s siphon hole,” said Hentz, scraping back inch after inch of tidal sand with a clam hoe. “You want a good deep hole — about seven or eight inches deep — then you keep that hole open and just move the flats away from the clam.”

“Soft-shell clams are filter feeders,” said Becky Kolak, KELT’s education coordinator, explaining the structure of a clam to the group. “That means they’re taking in the surrounding water and getting oxygen and food, like plankton and bacteria, through the siphon,” she said, pointing to a tube protruding from the shell.

“At the tip of the siphon, there are two openings,” she said. “There is the incurrent siphon, which brings in water, and the excurrent siphon, where the water exits after the oxygen and food has been taken out.”

Opposite from the siphon is the foot, said Kolak, which the clams use to dig down into the tidal mud and anchor themselves in the flats.

“When a soft-shell clam is small — when it’s a spat — it is actually free swimming,” said Kolak. “It will swim around and test a bunch of different spots on the tidal flat.

“Once it finds a spot that it thinks is agreeable to grow in, it will use that foot,” she said, “and that is where it’s going to stay for the rest of its life.”

Cracking a clam open with a butter knife, Kolak and Ruth Indrick, KELT’s project manager, described the digestive system of the clam and explained how the clams grow their shells from the mantle, a cartilage-like ruffle encircling the clam.

“The way you can tell how old a clam is, is by counting the rings on its shell,” said Indrick. “This one has five rings, so its about five years old,” she said, displaying the shell of the dissected clam.

Any person is permitted to dig up to one peck of clams per day in Maine’s state parks, said Hentz, with no shellfish license required. A peck is a dry agricultural measure, equal to nine and a half liquid quarts — or enough to fill a nearly half of a five gallon pail, he said.

“Commercial diggers have to sell clams to a certified dealer and the dealers are buying clams by weight now rather than by volume,” said Hentz. “Four pecks makes a bushel, and a bushel is about 50 pounds.

“Right now, I would be willing to bet that clams are about $150 a bushel,” said Hentz, “which is higher than they have been in my lifetime or in anybody’s lifetime.”

The high price is owing, in part, to the toll the green crab invasion has taken on the soft-shell clam population, said Hentz. Closures of polluted areas have also limited access in some places, and limited resources at the state level have placed a greater burden of work on fewer people at the Maine Department of Marine Resources, he said.

“Rather important for the clam industry — the way you measure a clam,” said Hentz, noting that clams with a shell under two inches in length cannot be harvested.

“Be conservative. If you’ve got a clam that is less than two inches, just throw it back in the hole,” he said, holding up a clam that measured an inch and one quarter. “This little guy is just starting to grow his third year,” he said, tossing the young clam back into flats for another year’s harvest.

“Clamming is a quintessential Maine activity,” said Kolak, and the program hosted by KELT “exposes people to the cultural side of an industry that local people make their livelihood from.

“It’s very hard work,” she said. “Doing the work yourself, you think about the guys that are out there for an entire tide digging barrels of these things — you’re not just digging a hole and pulling them out, it takes skill.”

The Kennebec Estuary Land Trust is a nonprofit conservation organization dedicated to protecting the land, water and wildlife of the Kennebec estuary area. KELT maintains nine preserves and has protected more than 2,500 acres of land since 1989.

rgargiulo@timesrecord.com