Traditional protection proves more successful for clams in American Samoa

Here’s Sonam Lama Hyolmo at Mongaybay covering a recent article that found that in American Samoa, traditional village-based protections and remote sites had the highest density of giant clams — outperforming federally designated no-take zones in one case.

For coastal Indigenous communities in American Samoa, giant clams are deeply rooted in fa‘a Sāmoa (the Samoan way of life) and local food systems.

According to the findings of a study published in PeerJ, it is village-based protections like fa‘asao (fishery closures) that have helped conserve giant clams lying in the islands’ shallow water coral reefs. The authors found that the highest clam densities and species are located in remote sites and areas under traditional village enforcement, outperforming federally designated no-take zones on the most populated island.

The authors examined giant clam population trends, clam densities and distributions, and species composition across six islands — Tutuila, Aunuʻu, Ofu, Olosega, Taʻū and Muliāva — from 1994/5 to surveys conducted between 2022-24. While the highly populated island of Tutuila had the lowest clam densities with 83.5 individuals per hectare (33.8 per acre), remote islands like Taʻū and Muliāva showed higher densities up to 812 to 1,166 per hectare (328 to 471 per acre).

On Tutuila, which had multiple types of management zones, subsistence and remote sites had the highest densities of giant clams, followed by remote areas, then village protected areas. Federal no-take sites held the lowest mean density of clams overall on the island.

Readers will note that this concept of indigenous conservation is something we’ve covered here before, as history provides “stories of success and recovery, even from the brink of disaster.”