BURIED TREASURE
Cal Flyn discovers the weird and wonderful world of razor clams, the alien-like molluscs that lie beneath Scotland’s beaches
Wildlife correspondent Cal Flyn uncovers the weird and wonderful ways of razor clams
March brings longer days, and the spring equinox on the twentieth of the month. However you choose to mark it, if at all, know this: the sea responds the same way it does every year, with the equinoctial tides.
As day and night are coming into balance, and the moon is just so, the sea will draw back with a sigh to reveal stretches of coastline that go unseen the rest of the year. This is your time to go out looking for razor clams.
No doubt you’re familiar with their shells: long, elegant cigarette-holders in tawny and plum, scoured silver by the sand. They wash up on beaches as two perfect halves, joined by a delicate hinge. It’s harder to find them alive.
But you’ve a couple of options. In
Orkney, during the ‘spoot tides’ as they call them, they have a tradition of gathering razor clams via a delicate method. First, one walks slowly backwards across exposed sand flats. A razor clam bed will make itself visible by the tell-tale ‘shows’ the molluscs leave in the sand: small, penny-sized indentations or holes where they have burrowed into the seabed.
If you see them, you’re close. Razor clams are filter feeders who lurk in the silt, their mouths (or rather, siphons) pressed up against the surface. If your footsteps disturb one, it will let out a jet of water about a foot into the air, giving its location away as it dives down deeper into the sand.
That’s your chance to pounce, but be quick. Orcadians carry knives or trowels and drop to their knees at once to give chase, digging as fast as they can. The razor clam has a powerful, muscular ‘foot’, and it can be difficult to catch hold of them. If you press them sideways into the sand, the shell will be trapped and give up the fight. There’s a knack to it you likely won’t get all at once.
If that sounds too energetic for your liking, there’s a low-octane alternative used all around the country. Carry a tub of salt, and pour some liberally into the open holes. After a few seconds, a strange rippling will occur, and then – horrifyingly – the shell will emerge from the muck, with a lewd thrusting motion, ready to be grasped.
Whichever method you choose, pop the razor clam into a bucket of sea water for closer contemplation. Once settled, the razor fish will show their soft inner parts: the creamy white foot on its pale, muscular stem. It emerges tentatively, and moves like a tongue tasting the water. They are fascinating to watch, almost unearthly in their strangeness.
At this point, it’s up to you what to do with them. Once you’ve satisfied your curiosity you might simply wish to return them to where you found them. More likely, you’ll want to make
use of them. Razor clam, I’m told, make excellent bait for cod and bass; fishermen catch them in spring and freeze them for use year-round.
Or you might like to eat them. If so, the key here is speed. You want them fresh, and flash-fried or steamed. Anything longer than a few minutes will ruin their flavour, which might be charitably described as ‘delicate’ at the best of times. Done right, they are tender and sweet, a little like squid. Mark Williams, a foraging expert from Galloway Wild Foods, likes to eat them raw, wrapped in a wild garlic leaf, or lightly poached in a dashi-style broth.
Although they are a traditional Scottish food, they have fallen out of fashion. These days, they are most popular in the Far East, particularly in China. Winse Chan, a Scottish chef of Chinese heritage, recommends a recipe passed down in her family for razor clams with black beans and garlic. As with all shellfish, be mindful of hygiene. Eat only from the most unpolluted beaches, and discard any dead razor clams (ones that don’t respond to stimuli) before cooking.
The East Asian market for razor clams is large and growing, and has become increasingly important to Scottish fishermen. In 2016, 461 tonnes of razor fish were landed in Scottish ports, worth around £2.3m. Indeed, there’s so much money in razor clams that they have become an unlikely focus of organised crime gangs; one illegal clam fishing outfit, rumbled in Argyll in 2014, was reported to be making £65,000 a day by selling them on the black market. According to police, razor clams are now more lucrative than drugs. An estimated 10 to 20 rogue boats are still thought to be fishing for razor clams, unlicensed, around the Scottish coast.
They are thought to be using ‘electrofishing’ techniques which use pulses of electricity that, like the salt, cause the razor clams to leave their burrows. Electrofishing more generally has been a subject of huge controversy in recent years, and last year MEPs voted to ban the practice in European waters by 2021.
Currently, however, a Scottish Government-backed trial of electrofishing for razor clams is underway after a 2014 Marine Scotland report suggested that the method, under close monitoring, could be less environmentally damaging than current legal methods, like dredging. Since February 2018, 28 Scottish vessels in 11 sites across the country – including the Solway Firth, the Firth of Clyde, the Western Isles and the Firth of Forth – have been experimenting with the method, which sees a bar discharging electricity dragged over the seabed, with the divers following in its wake scooping up the razor clams as they appear.
Alistair Hughson, managing director of Keltic Seafare and chairman of the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation, has
“Although they are a traditional Scottish food, they have fallen out of fashion
been taking part. ‘In my opinion, if we are going to fish for razor clams at all, then electrofishing is the least harmful way to do that.’ Hand-picking is not viable as a commercial method, while salting leaves a chemical trace in the environment. Dredging, he says, is ‘obviously very disruptive’ and has the drawback of killing many of the creatures it is trying to catch.
But, ‘electrofishing may well have as-yet-unknown negative effects’, particularly at microscopic levels which as yet has gone unstudied. Hence, says Hughson, the need for more research.
To Charles Clover, author of The End of the Line and executive director of the Blue Marine Foundation, this is a risk we can’t afford to take. ‘Fishing with electricity, no matter for what species or with what parameters, is just a matter of quickly increasing economic profits. It has nothing to do with sustainability,’ he tells me.
‘There must be a moratorium on electrofishing until full scientific investigations are complete,’ he insists. ‘We must not charge ahead with this large-scale trial with no end date in sight. This can only be damaging to efforts to raise the international reputation for quality of Scottish seafood.’ Clover likens the trial to Japan’s practice of ‘scientific whaling’.
For those of us on the foreshore, stepping backwards through the silt, the stakes are smaller and the rules simpler: a razor clam harvester might legally hand-pick up to 30 molluscs a day. But remember, take only what you need. You can’t freeze them, and they won’t live for long. Throw the little ones back. A philosophy which, writ large, we would all benefit from in the end.