Well, as far as can be determined, the word comes from a west-coast first nations word, perhaps the Salish word gʷídəq, “dig deep”. That makes it less crisp, more round and dull and perhaps muddy. “Gooey duck,” to be precise: that’s how you would do better to say it. It may look like the name of some environmentalist avian comic superhero (“Step away from those protected clams!” “Gaaahhh! It’s Geoduck!”), but it’s actually kind of gooey. You won’t be suckin’ ’em back like raw oysters, though.Īnd is the word geoduck delicious? Well, first you have to know how it tastes.
The siphon meat is best used in chowder (diced, I presume), and the body (the mantle) can be sliced into escalopes and prepared a variety of ways. But they can be eaten, and in fact Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food tells us that geoduck meat is delicious. The most dangerous one is willing to pay more than $150 a pound for these things (imagine dropping $1600 on a turkey). They get to live to such a ripe old age in part because they have few natural predators. The biggest burrowing clam in the world, and one of the longest-lived critters on the planet, too. It digs in, then sits and sucks and blows water. Now, admittedly, it does have something to do with earth – the earth that is under water. (The Chinese name, 象拔蚌 xiàngbábàng, means “elephant-trunk clam”.) And it looks rather phallic, too, thanks to that long siphon. This is a clam that is around the size of a turkey. In fact, let’s also give it a tail – OK, a siphon – that can get up to 70 centimetres long. Well, now, let’s make this one up to 5 kilograms, and let’s make it so its shell can’t actually close over its body. Unducklike and un-earthy enough for you?īut tell me about clams, now: what are they? Well, things that have their body inside a shell – they can close the shell and hide in it. Let’s say it’s one that basically sits where it is and sucks in and spits out water its whole life, which can last well over 100 years. Given that, what kind of critter would have about as little as you can think to do with ducks or with earth? Hmm, how about some kind of a marine critter. Let’s establish that it’s a critter of some sort. There’s lots of other weirdness to get through first. OK, well, it often is pronounced like it’s spelled, but that’s not the original pronunciation and is still not the preferred pronunciation for those in the know. Not only that, it’s not pronounced like it’s spelled. This word and what it denotes have nothing to do with ducks, and only arguably something to do with earth. Put them together and you have something that is, as the saying goes, neither fish nor fowl.īut, oh, that’s not even the half of it. Fast fact: it’s illegal in Washington state to possess only the siphon of a geoduck.This word, at first sight, seems to be a paradoxical mix: geo says “earth” to us, and duck says “waterfowl”. Pulling on the siphon will break it and kill the animal. If you’re lucky enough to see a geoduck siphon on a Puget Sound beach, touch it gently-if you can even do so fast enough before the geoduck retracts it. True to their name, geoducks are generally found buried two to three feet deep in mud, sand or gravel on Puget Sound beaches (by comparison, Manila clams are usually two to four inches underground).
Geo duck siphon full size#
Geoducks can live more than 150 years, and don’t reach their full size until they’re 15 years old. The largest geoduck ever weighed and verified by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife was a whopping 8.16 pounds. Their shells are between six and eight inches long, and their siphons (the “necks” that protrude from their shells) can be over three feet long! When fully mature, Puget Sound geoducks weigh, on average, a bit over two pounds. Geoducks ( Panopea generosa) are native to the west coast of North America, and their name is derived from a phrase in the Nisqually language, gʷídəq, which means “dig deep.” Other names for this majestic mollusk: mud duck, king clam and (translated from Chinese) elephant-trunk clam.
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