The hunt was on for signs of the once-abundant pismo clams, tiny treasures that bury themselves below the sandy surface.

The Southern California creature once made for countless seaside feasts, but that was decades ago and the species has became a scarce sight.

The volunteers armed with rakes who scoured the Bolsa Chica State Beach shoreline this week weren’t looking to eat the tasty critters. Instead, their goal was to document any pismos they could find for a survey spearheaded by the nonprofit Get Inspired, part of an effort to figure out how many still exist and, ultimately, how their population can be restored.

“Oh, they are still here,” said Nancy Caruso, founder of Get Inspired, which is known for its work reviving struggling species such as kelp and abalone. “There’s some, but they are really hard to find. People are nostalgic about them, like the abalone.”

Caruso has connected with marine biologists, volunteers and innovative high schoolers who are surveying and studying the species. And if all goes well, they hope to unlock the secret to reproducing them in a controlled environment to give the pismo clams some help rebounding.

Clambakes no more

Ask any oldtimer who grew up at the beach, and they’ll likely have tales of clamming along the coast.

Bill McQuade, of Garden Grove, fondly remembers spending hours out in the ocean searching for clams. Now 68, he still has his clam rake in his garage.

“I never pulled a clam that was under size, they were all big,” he recalled. “They were all good.”

All were bigger than six inches, best found during the winter’s negative tide, he said. He and his friends would wear wetsuits and tennis shoes, ready to take on the waves, rake in hand.

“We would swim out through the waves to beyond the deep water trough to get to where we could stand again with the water up to our chin,” he said, recalling how he’d work backward, toward shore, and stop if he hit anything hard.

“There were no rocks out there so you knew you had found a clam,” he said.

Then came the hard part. They’d dive down and dig it out by hand, while trying to dodge incoming waves.

“It was a ball.”

His specialty was linguine and clams, sometimes making fried clams for his feast.

But then, the pismo calms disappeared sometime midway into ’80s.

Still, McQuade makes his famous linguine and clams, but these days gets his clams from a can.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said, sheepishly.

The clams’ demise is thought to have come from a combination of recreational fishing pressure – thousands of mature clams being removed each weekend, millions in a season, as well as possible impacts from the 1983 El Nino storms that ravaged the coast, said Sean Bignami, associate professor of biology and marine lab director at Concordia University in Irvine, which is involved in the collaboration.

“From the literature, that’s when it’s thought to be the turning point and they haven’t really bounced back,” he said, noting there could be other human impacts such as pollution or development that has impacted their ability to thrive.  “It’s a mystery. At this point it’s hard to say what happened 45 years ago to impact those populations.”

A resurgence?

There is a bit of a buzz in Pismo Beach, where there’s been a resurgence of the clams recently, decades after they went virtually missing. It’s giving hope to the residents that their beloved mascot is making a comeback.

Pismo Beach may be dubbed the “Clam Capital of the World,” but for its annual festival, clams have been brought in from out of town.

Teams from the Center for Coastal Marine Sciences at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo have been doing monthly clam surveys to tracking the growing population, coding the creatures with QR numbers so they can later be found with metal detectors, according to a story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has also taken notice of the recent resurgence. Officers have been reclaiming thousands of undersized clams from poachers each year and reburying them. The department has sent out educational notices and warnings for those taking pismos that are smaller than the legal size of 4.5 inches.

Taking the smaller clams that are not yet at reproductive age means their numbers won’t have the chance to further multiply.

And the resurgence in population seen in Pismo Beach, might not be seen elsewhere along the coast, Bignami said.

“This is one of the questions we have with the pismo clams – we don’t know how interconnected the species is,” he said, noting the populations north of Point Conception are “reasonably isolated.”

“I would not expect changes in Pismo Beach to be indicative of what happens down here,” he said.

There’s has been a surge in younger clams seen recently in San Diego and even a few bigger, older ones – but the species is so sensitive Bignami said it’s best not give an exact location.

“Technically, in Orange County, there’s still a few of those big ones out there, but you’d be hard pressed to find them,” he said.

But just maybe, they don’t need a beach to grow at all.

Clam tacos

The solution was simple, yet so unexpected.

Finding just the right contraption to hold a pismo clam in a lab setting was a struggle. It needed to be held upright, but not so tight that the shells couldn’t open slightly to feed.

It was Aisha Vaughan, a sophomore at University High in Irvine and an intern at the Ocean Institute, who thought about her dinner the previous evening. How about a taco holder?

“That actually worked shockingly well,” Jessica Brasher, director of husbandry at the Ocean Institute, said.

The Ocean Institute is another of the collaborators, tasked with figuring out how to keep pismos alive – and how to get them to thrive – in a lab setting.

“We’re kind of writing an empty roadmap here. They obviously live in sand, they are hard to count and calculate. One of the steps we’re trying to crack – do we even need sand?” she said. “This is a tiny piece in a huge puzzle. We don’t have the total picture yet, but we can start from there.”

If they can get the clams to grow in a lab, as they have been with abalone, it opens up the possibility of raising them alongside other aquaculture projects.

The Ocean Institute is teaming with Holdfast Aquaculture in Long Beach, which plans this summer to build a hatchery for cultivating pismo clams. Already, they produce baby oysters and mussels.

Bignami’s team at Concordia is also doing lab experiments.

“We’re trying to get some funding to work on closing the lifecycle of the pismo clam in captivity, so we can produce them for commercial use, but also for restoration and conservation work,” he said.

Already, Caruso has trained 100 volunteers on how to comb the beaches for the survey, with plans to work from Bolsa Chica to Newport Beach and eventually onto the peninsula in Long Beach.

Success so far has been limited – in about a 90-minute span, they find anywhere from one to a dozen clams and smaller than legal size to take. There are about  0.05 clams per square meter of beach in Orange County, Caruso estimates.

Get Inspired was recently awarded a $10,000 grant from the Orange County Community Foundation toward efforts to survey the local coastline for the clams and help with lab research on growing clams in controlled environments.

Bignami has yet to taste a pismo clam. All the ones he finds he dedicates to his research – but he hopes one day there will be so many, he’ll feel comfortable cooking some.

“I wasn’t brought up in a time when clambakes were a thing, this is only something in the past I’ve learned about,” he said. “I’m hoping we can continue to understand the species better, we can boost those population levels through conservation, management and restoration work.”

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