Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar

Apr 29, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Coastal Kayaking Tours and Acadia Bike.

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BAR HARBOR—The group of people out in Clark’s Cove near low tide Monday afternoon weren’t clammers.

They were College of the Atlantic students and Bar Harbor Marine Resources Committee members.

And they weren’t clamming.

But what they were doing in the rocky flats had everything to do with clams.

“We will be doing our standard DMR-style survey with 1×2 foot plots, but will also spend some time looking at the oyster resource in the area,” Bar Harbor Marine Resources Committee Chair Chris Petersen said in an email to members.

The students were broken up into five groups of four and each group was given the necessary equipment; a clam hoe, a 1-foot-square box with wire mesh on one side, a five-gallon bucket of water, a PVC pipe connector of approximately 5 inches in diameter, a homemade sieve, and a clipboard with the form to record the results.

Petersen then instructed the students on how to mark out the sample areas and dig for clams. The sample area is supposed to be a 1-foot-by-2-feet area so the box is set down twice in the mud to form a rectangle of the appropriate size.

Within this rectangle is the area to be dug, to a depth of at least six inches, and the mud is sifted through for clams which are placed into the box that has been turned over so that the wire mesh can be used as a sieve and the metric ruler attached to the bottom is revealed.

The mud is then sifted through and the clams removed, counted, measured, and sorted by type. The results are then recorded on the survey form.

Next comes the PVC joint connector which is then used to collect a bore sample. The PVC is twisted back and forth until it has been embedded in the mud at least two inches, a hand is placed underneath it, and then the sample is removed and placed into the homemade sieve. The sieve is then placed into the five gallon bucket of water and rinsed of mud in the same way that one would pan for gold.

This method is how baby clams, known as spat, are located and inventoried.

Many communities have shellfish or marine resources committees where the volunteer members head out to the clam flats to get a rough estimate of the clams that are on that flat.

“Since Bar Harbor first enacted a shellfish ordinance in 1998, a number of groups and individuals, led by Jane Disney and the Bar Harbor Marine Resources Committee, have focused a great deal of effort on monitoring populations of the soft-shell clam (Mya arenaria) in Bar Harbor. Most attention has centered on the intertidal at Hadley Point, where the town has set in place a series of conservation closures,” Petersen and Kipp Quimby wrote in 2007.

The data communities gather helps those communities make decisions about how many shellfish harvesters the resources can handle.

It can also be a bit of a wake-up call for the data-minded to see if the clam populations are thriving or withering.

A few years ago, shellfish harvester David Dunton sat on some ledges on the southern tip of a local island and had a hard think.

“Five to seven years ago, I really considered that it was time to quit,” Dunton said of the life he’s been doing for decades—harvesting shellfish. He sat there, he said, and thought, “I can’t stop the crash. I can’t stop the cycle.”

The shellfish he harvested weren’t growing as fast as they should or they could.

“The truth is 95 to 97% of this town’s (harvestable) shoreline is gone,” he told members of the town’s Marine Resources Committee in 2023.

But Dunton didn’t give up his hope or his livelihood. The committee charged with shellfish conservation programs in Bar Harbor hasn’t either.

Dunton took matters into his own hands after the moment on the ledges. “I left about 50 bushels of large clams in the mud. They seeded well.”

“The clams we have now are in areas where the crabs don’t have a good way to attack them,” Dunton said. “It’s still dead out there. Out in back of my house, 80% of the mud is dead.”

In Clark Cove, committee members said back in 2023, about 95% of the oysters were gone. Commercial harvesters and recreational harvesters took them. There are no regulations in Bar Harbor about this, Peterson said, so there was nothing Assistant Harbormaster Chris Johansen could do.

Clark’s Cove had been harvested by Dunton’s father and others for years. In 2021 and 2022, the cove, Dutton said, has been stripped irresponsibly by what he believes are commercial diggers from other towns.

“I’ve seen them take quahogs—take them out four inches and push them out of there. They are taking the future,” Dunton had said. “What’s going on isn’t protecting it.”

Conservation, understanding, and disseminating information are all part of the Marine Resource Committee’s volunteer work and commitment to the town and the waters around it.

The data collected at Clark’s Cove will be collated and discussed at upcoming Marine Resource Committee meetings.

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Photos: Shaun Farrar/Bar Harbor Story

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

State’s shellfish survey Field Guide

• Do current recruitment enhancement methods increase juvenile soft-shell clam (Mya arenaria) recruitment in an intertidal clam flat? is a 2009 report that was part of a College of the Atlantic student senior project by Sarah Drerup.
• Resource management in a small Maine town: monitoring, conserving, and managing clam flats in Bar Harboris a 2007 report that was the basis of a College of the Atlantic student senior project by Kipp Quinby.
• Clam surveys and management in Bar Harbor is a 2003 report by College of the Atlantic students Kipp Quinby and Nina Therkildsen.

Shellfish Area Closures

Before clamming in any area in Bar Harbor you should check to make sure the area is open. Potential shellfish closures are as listed:

• Bacterial closures
• Flood closures
• Red tide closures
• Statewide closures

Call the Department of Marine Resources Maine Red Tide and Shellfish Sanitation Hotline 1-800-232-4733 or 207-633-9571 with any other questions.

These state sites are important to check so that you can verify that there are no long-term or short-term local closures due to red tides, rain, or other activities that could contaminate shellfish. To check for these in Bar Harbor you can also call the Bar Harbor Harbormaster at 288-5571.

To get more general information on water quality in Maine, you can check out these websites:

• Eating shellfish and swimming
• Maine red tide closures

Softshellpopulationsurveyfieldguide

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