Soft-shell clams face steep challenges along the coast of Maine, where harvests have fallen by 75% since the mid-1970s amid warming waters and the arrival of invasive green crabs that eat their young.
On the shores of Herrick Bay in the Hancock County town of Brooklin, once its most productive flat, testing suggests harvesters face an additional issue: pig feces washing down into a bay from Selectman David Reiley’s small farm upstream, where remediation efforts have apparently stalled for more than a year.
“This has been ongoing for a long time,” said David Tarr, chair of the town’s shellfish committee.
Only three commercial harvesters now work in Brooklin, which has also seen its soft-shell clam numbers dramatically decline in past decades. Often, state closures due to bacterial pollution result from sources like wildlife waste or faulty septic systems that are harder to control, according to Tarr.
But in this case, residents believe the shores could be at least seasonally opened if the pig waste can be contained, an unusual example of a Maine town that could reclaim some of its shellfish production. Even though few harvesters remain, residents also say they want the water clean for its own sake.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources closes harvesting areas when high levels of fecal bacteria make shellfish unsafe to eat.
In April, it added 26 acres at the head of the bay to a list of areas where harvesting is restricted, meaning no one can dig there without a special permit.
That’s a step further than the conditional, generally weather-based closures that clamming areas are commonly subject to, and a step below a “prohibited” designation.
The department didn’t grant an interview request, but said no source of the pollution has been identified in Herrick Bay. It will continue routine monitoring while residents work to figure out the source and whether it can be remediated, a spokesperson said.
Reiley’s farm is so far upstream that it previously seemed an unlikely culprit, but advances in technology recently identified that feces in the water comes from swine, according to Tarr.
“We feel like we’ve pinpointed [it],” he said. “We feel like we know where it is.”
Reiley had a $12,000 grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service to help address the problem and planned to move his 30 pigs elsewhere on the property, he told the Rising Tide online news site last fall. Reiley has said there are only 10 pigs there now, Tarr said Thursday.
Much of that money was used for remediation analysis, which said the animals should be moved to a different part of the farm and their pens should be paved with concrete to streamline manure cleanup, according to the Rising Tide.
Reiley did not return a request for comment Thursday.
Tarr, who is 60, remembers when there were clams on all the area’s shores up to Surry, and recalled going out to dig them as an 8-year-old to buy school clothes and earn pocket money. Many of those areas are now at least seasonally closed due to pollution, and numbers are falling.
“It’s not that it’s being dug up,” Tarr said. “It’s just that [the clams] are not there.”
Only two Brooklin residents now clam commercially, both of them part-time, and one nonresident who digs clams full time.
There were up to 14 when Tarr was harvesting commercially himself about a decade and a half ago, he said, and decades before that there were up to 40 or 50. Another 69 people had recreational clamming licenses in 2025, according to the town’s committee reports.
Brooklin’s average landings between 2021 were on the lower end of Hancock County towns, according to state data, though others reported no landings at all.
Clamming wasn’t hugely lucrative for the town before, Tarr said, but about $400,000 worth of clams once came from the flat.
It’s still possible for larger “depuration” operations to take clams from some flats that have been closed, which they do in Brooklin. Those businesses keep clams in clean water until the contaminants cycle out and they’re safe to eat.
The town gets 50 cents per bushel from those operations, according to Tarr. One bushel can be worth $75 to $300 depending on the time of year.
“There’s been a lot of money that came out of there that didn’t go to the town,” Tarr said.
He’d prefer those dollars to stay local, and noted that managing the fishery takes time and money.
Water samples are still failing tests, according to Tarr. The town did some testing of its own by boat, rather than from samples collected from shore, which he said makes them slightly more representative and did lead to the outer area of the bay being reopened. It seems the pig waste only washes out to the bay during heavy rainfall events, rather than in a consistent stream, he said.
Tarr is disappointed it’s taken so long to address and doesn’t want to put a farm out of business, but thinks the problem is fixable.
He believes it’s a matter of money and not knowing what to do, rather than a lack of desire to fix things. Until that happens, however, the town’s avenues are limited.
Tarr sees the larger decline of clam populations as a long-term change due to complex factors.
“I always figured that I could support my family off of what comes off the clam flats in town if I needed to,” he said. But now, he’s not sure, with prices down and numbers declining.
Invasive green crabs that eat larval soft-shell clams broadly get the blame, though Tarr said that when it comes to the complex ocean, it’s also hard to point immediately to a single cause of changes.
While clamming may not be as much of a way of life as it used to be there, residents are still worried about water quality aside from commercial impacts.
“People want the water clean,” Tarr said. “Whether or not they’re going to eat the shellfish out of Herrick’s Bay, they want the water clean.”
