WEST BATH — Jordan Kramer stood on the deck of his boat, the Muffin II, looking down at a pile of hundreds and hundreds of cream- and buff-colored quahogs spread out on a piece of plywood in an area roughly the size of a dinner platter.
“A lot of work has gone into this small pile of clams,” Kramer said.
Even though the clams are too tiny to even think about eating, that small pile was a success story. He’d planted 80,000 Mercenaria mercenaria (the proper name for what are more commonly called quahogs or hard-shell clams) seeds in June 2017, and lost half early on. Handling seed of 1 mm or smaller without losing some is not easy. But of those that remained, between 90 and 98 percent of his baby quahogs had survived their first winter on the New Meadows fish farm. Since June, the seed clams had shot up to 11 mm, and even 17 mm in size. They would have stopped growing around November, when Kramer put the farm to bed, but in the warming days of spring, they’re already getting bigger.
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