Green crabs, worms, ocean acidification have clobbered Maine’s soft-shelled clam harvest

Maine is the soft-shell clam capital of the country. But clammers harvested less than 1.5 million pounds last year, the lowest total in a quarter century – down from nearly 8 million pounds at the industry’s height in the late 1970s.

So reports the Portland Press-Herald in this story about how a combination of environmental problems, including invasive crabs and the ocean getting more acidic (a byproducts of carbon in the atmosphere), is hurting their population. It’s a sobering reminder (as if we need more sobering reminders these days) of how environmental problems are not stand-alone issues – they combine and overlap and often make each other worse.