Tuesday 28 June How to breed Giant Clams

The breeding clams

Sluices for raising juvenilled

The stormy southerly winds have cleared away and it's another fine day. We took the dinghy to the jetty, climbed up a rickety ladder to a very warm welcome from two men who work at the mariculture centre. Both are called Tei and come from the offshore Lau islands.
Tei and Tei showed us how the centre is helping to repopulate the calm and giant clams back into the islands after the villagers have taken too many for the species to flourish. Who spends time considering the reproductive intricacies of the clam? Briefly, clams is a hermaphrodite which spawns once a year. Here they keep the clams (up to 40cms across and Giant Clams up to 1.5m) in tanks as breeders. The spawn is collected and when they have developed a shell a couple of centimetres long 50 are embedded into a thin slab of concrete and this is placed in another tank fed with seawater to develop. Once they reach maturity, around 3 years, they are 'released' or placed on the sea bed on the outer islands and the villagers given a stern lecture on not eating them.

David, Jacqui,Tei, Christine

Its all government sponsored and large enough to require 5 families to live and tend to the farming full time. The programme's been running for 16 years and the earliest animals bred are still living in the anchorage in less than 5m of water and very easy to snorkel. I didn't know that the deeper a clam lives the bluer it's visible flesh and those living in shallower turn brown as a protection from increased sunlight penetrating the water. So a clam can get a suntan too.

original leper house

Jail cell of former leper colony

The second good reason to visit Makongi is to see the remains of the former leper colony. Between 1911 and 1969 French missionaries looked after leprosy sufferers who were brought here from all over the Pacific. At the height there were 5000 people here with houses, a cinema, jails for men and women and a cemetery which you can see today. We waded up to the graveyard (yesterdays rain had flooded the path)in the trees, much over grown now. (Two days after our visit I asked a doctor friend about the disease. Leprosy is a bacterial infection treatable with antibiotics. I believe there is still a some hospice in Suva today).
As if clams and social history lessons weren't enough, David and I added a master-class in sushi making. Chris from Stray Kitty has been making sushi for years and offered to teach us how to make our own sushi rolls with the special rice and sheets of nori wrapped around yellow fin tuna. We passed the test and ate a scrumptious supper. Sometimes it's a hard life as a cruiser. Not.
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