The Universe and Geoducks

Note: Before I put my writings down in blog format, I used to just send out emails to friends whom I thought would indulge me. The topics would range from hearing a song on the radio or, as in this case, seeing something funny on National Geographic.

May 15, 2008

The universe has a wacky sense of humor. (I would have said "God" but my Catholic upbringing makes me balk at this, imagining lighting strikes and the earth swallowing me up if I uttered such blasphemy). And so it shall be, the "universe" has a very wacky sense of humor.

The other night, my son and I watched a show on Discovery Channel called "Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe". We love watching this show because the host, Mike Rowe, features people doing jobs that we never really think about like "road kill collecting" or "sewer cleaning" or "pig wrangling", well you get the picture. That night, the job featured was "geoduck farming".

What the heck is a geoduck, you ask. In the first place, the name is not what it seems. Geoduck, pronounced "gooey duck", is NOT a duck. It is, in fact, a kind of shellfish, a bivalve if you're into specifics. It is native to the American and Canadian Pacific Coast, specifically Washington State, British Columbia, and Southeast Alaska. It typically lives up to 146 years and the oldest recorded is 160 years old (although how they were able to record this, I do not know—Wikipedia was sketchy about this claim). But its age is not the most remarkable thing about this bivalve.

In the show, Mike Rowe and the geoduck farmer drove rows upon rows of cut pvc pipes into some tidal flats and placed small clam-like baby geoducks in the sand inside the pvc pipes like seeds in a rice paddy. As babies, geoducks are non-descript, just run-of-the-mill white clams, the kind you would find in Iloilo's imbao soup.

Geoducks, when they grow, begin to resemble "diwals" and then some. At least 10 times larger in fact, that when Karwin and I saw the adult geoducks on tv, we could not help but burst out laughing. Okay, okay, I've said enough. Click on the link below and have a look for yourself and see if you agree with my hypothesis about the universe. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpU6cKIde5I

Postcript: After I wrote this, I had the opportunity to eat geoduck in Hongkong sometime in September 2008 and what do you know? It tasted really good! It was sliced thinly, much like bamboo shoots, and was crunchy to the bite, much similar to eating jelly fish, only smoother and the taste, to my recollection, was quite subtle like scallops.