This is on point. I'm Megna Chacrobardi. If you walk along the beach on the Pacific Northwest

coast, you might not notice some very special things. They're called clam gardens and they've

been sitting along the shore for thousands of years.

Clam gardens are these really special intertidal spaces where for thousands of years indigenous

people moved rocks to the low tide line to terrace the beach just like you could terrace

a hill to grow more grapes. You can terrace a beach to increase the area for clams to live.

That's Marco Hatch. He's an associate professor at Western Washington University in Environmental

Science and a member of the Samish Indian Nation. He's also a clam garden expert.

Now clam gardens are an indigenous innovation that's essentially a rock wall along the shoreline.

These structures allow the rising tides to bring sediment over the rock wall to create

an ideal habitat for the clams. But then during low tide, it creates an exposed beach that's

ideal for harvesting. Hatch says clams grown in gardens are two to four times the size

of other clams and the gardens are 150% to 300% more productive than wild beaches.

Clam gardens are really fascinating ecologically because the very rocks that define a clam garden,

those basket ball sized rocks on the low tide line, creates this fascinating three-dimensional

structure. All of these rocks piled up with little hidey holes for other things to live

in them. Like big snails or limpids or kaitens or red rock crab or seaweed, which are all

also traditional foods. And so we often focus on the clam productivity, but that rock wall itself

creates this really complex environment that lots of other native species and traditional foods

also reside in. Clam gardens are ancient. Examples approximately 3,500 years old are known from

Washington state to coastal British Columbia, Canada and all the way up to Southeast Alaska.

But Hatch says many more have yet to be discovered. And that's because for thousands of years,

...