🐚 The clam that keeps changing its name

Walk past a fish counter and the clams look like several different creatures, sorted into several different prices. They are not. They are one species at different sizes, and the size names are trade names — words invented by the people who buy and sell them. You can tell they are trade names because they move. NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Review printed the whole story: “In the 1970’s, the quahog dealers in Long Island, N.Y., increased the prices of quahogs by first adding a new trade name, ‘topneck,’ for a new size category they created between littleneck and cherrystone, and they dropped the name ‘medium.’” Then the sizes behind the words slid: “The topnecks are about the size of the original cherrystones, and the cherrystones are about the size of the original mediums.” The article even carries a table of the boundaries in inches for the 1910s, the mid 1990s and the late 1990s, and the three columns do not line up: the 1910s column has no “topneck” row at all, and it carries a “medium” row that has since disappeared. And it does not stop: “today some retail markets are selling ‘chowders’ as ‘cherrystones’ and selling them at cherrystone, and even littleneck, prices.” The clam did not change. The label did.

Basis: Clyde L. MacKenzie, Jr., Allan Morrison, David L. Taylor, Victor G. Burrell, Jr., William S. Arnold and Armando T. Wakida-Kusunoki, “Quahogs in Eastern North America: Part II, History by Province and State,” Marine Fisheries Review 64(3), NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service, section “Changes in Quahog Trade Sizes” and Table 1 (“Approximate size ranges (in inches) of various categories of quahogs used in the trade during the 1910’s, mid 1990’s, and late 1990’s”). Quotations unchanged.

The animal’s own name changes too — not with its size, but with where you are standing. The same NOAA article lays out both maps in two sentences: “Officially, the common name ‘northern quahog’ is listed for Mercenaria mercenaria, which ranges from New Brunswick, Canada, into Florida,” but “in the industry, the term quahog is used from the Canadian Maritimes through Rhode Island, while simply clam or hard clam is used from Connecticut through Texas.” So there is a line on the American coast, somewhere around the Connecticut border, where the same animal stops being a quahog and starts being a hard clam. Nothing about the clam is different on either side of it.

Basis: MacKenzie et al., “Quahogs in Eastern North America: Part II, History by Province and State,” Marine Fisheries Review 64(3), Introduction. Quotations unchanged. NOAA Fisheries’ species page uses the official common name “Northern Quahog” and notes it is “also known as hard clams.”

Long before any of those price tags, one part of this shell was worth something on its own: the purple. Look inside a big hard clam shell and there is a band of deep colour around the rim. NOAA’s companion article describes exactly that band, and what was made from it: “The purple beads ranged from deep purple to lavender; they were made from the purple area roughly 15 mm wide located around the anterior edge on the interior of large northern quahog shells.” The beads were wampum. “In colonial times, the natives made unique shell beads called wampum, which was used as personal ornaments and, when strung, used to cement treaties, and it was also used by the colonists as currency.” Even the word is borrowed: “The word wampum is a shortened form of wampumpeag or wampumpeake, an Algonquian word of southern New England meaning a string of shell beads.” And the purple was scarce by nature — “One or two purple beads could be made from a quahog shell.” One or two, from a whole clam.

Basis: Clyde L. MacKenzie, Jr., Allan Morrison, David L. Taylor, Victor G. Burrell, Jr., William S. Arnold and Armando T. Wakida-Kusunoki, “Quahogs in Eastern North America: Part I, Biology, Ecology, and Historical Uses,” Marine Fisheries Review 64(2), NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service, Introduction and “Purple and White Wampum.” Quotations unchanged.