Clams, Mussels, and Oysters, Oh My!

        The coolest thing about Carson is the wide variety of mollusks you can find during low tide. The past few days Arianna, Preston, and I have been tirelessly digging and searching with our young explorers to find these treasures.
        Wednesday was our biggest day of clamming. We were able to find many quahogs or hard-shell clams, as well as soft-shell clams while digging. Young explorers also found mussels during low tide and it was really fun showing them the differences between all the different bivalves. The best creature we found on Wednesday was a huge razor clam! I had just warned some kids to watch out for any sharp broken clamshells when one girl found a live razor clam!! The coolest part was putting the razor clam in the water and watching it come out of the shell. All the kids were amazed but it and were asking a lot of great and interesting questions about the clams and how they develop and function.
Thursday we were able to find more soft-shell clams and a few quahogs but the best find of the day was an oyster! The girls who found it were convinced that there would be a pearl inside and wanted to take it home. We explained to them that taking the oyster away from the beach would be taking it away from its home, and they agreed to keep it on the beach.
Hopefully in the coming week we will find enough clams to send to other sites to use for fishing bait. I can’t wait to see what we dig up next!
                                                                                                                           -Nora