Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

So it’s no secret the lobster industry keeps getting clobbered as world-wide demand and prices plummet and bait and fuel prices spiral upward. The shell fish community hasn’t been spared either. Routinely, flats are being closed due to run-off, and red tide, once a rarity, is now a more frequent occurrence here.

But imagine the problem besieging our fellow Downeasters in easternmost Lubec. There, the soft shell clam fishery is being hammered. Not just by price decline or red tide, though those are playing havoc, but by the invasion of moon snails.

“It’s like science fiction,” a marine ecologist is reported saying. Or maybe, I imagine, it’s like one of those sci-fi horror movies. Ones where the theatre marquis might read: GIANT INVADERS TAKE OVER THE COAST. Or: ENORMOUS PREDATORS DEVOUR ALL SEA LIFE.

Okay, I exaggerate.

The Maine/Northeast species of moon snails, lunatia heros, isn’t giant or enormous. It doesn’t even reach the baseball-size dimensions of some of its cousins. Of more diminutive proportions, the Maine moon snail rather politely fits within and thus stays inside its own shell and resembles only sparingly the largest moon snail species in which the shell, like an ill-fitting cap, sits atop a large mound of muscular, mucousy ooziness. Not that these littler guys aren’t big in appetite. They’re also serious – very serious – predators. Their meal of choice: soft shell clams. Yep, just what we homo sapiens crave for our steamers and fried clams.

To the evolutionary table, we humans bring our opposable thumbs, our tools and fire. In the never-ending battle to eat or avoid being eaten, clams don stony shells to defend their tender bodies. It should be noted that “soft,” as in soft-shell, is relative here. These clams’ brittle defensive armaments are actually plates of calcium carbonate, or limestone. But to that, the moon snail merely shrugs its (non-existent) shoulders and continues its slow but relentless advance. As Maine science writer Hannah Holmes points out:  Remember our grade school science class, our papier-mache volcano? Into that base of sodium bicarbonate, we poured vinegar. And, pouf. Voila! A mini-Vesuvius.

The moon snail’s vinegar is its acid spit. Glomming onto a carbonate-clad clam, the acid spit goes to work in concert with the moon snail’s raspy tongue. The spit dissolves the shell as the tongue works to make a hole with all the finesse and precision of a skilled human possessing a power drill. Fortunately, as Holmes points out, a clam has no eyes and doesn’t see this coming. Nor, without nerves in its shell, does it feel the pain of drilling, a fact some of us who’ve had to endure hours in a dentist’s chair can no doubt appreciate. Even before the hole breaks through and a sudden and final wash of enzymes swarms over the hapless clam, its body is already nearly dissolved. At that point the moon snail simply slurps up the clam, not so differently perhaps than how we humans, with a dash of Tabasco, slurp up an oyster.

Such carnivorous drama routinely plays out along our island shorelines, too. But not (at least not yet) in the frightening numbers besieging the clam population in far eastern Maine. The harvest there has dropped precipitously, thanks largely to the swelling number of moon snails unchecked by green crabs that are on the decline. According to an AP article, the harvest in the Cobscook Bay area has fallen from 800,000 pounds to just 100,000, a whopping 85% downturn. In Lubec alone, that translates to a fall-off in harvest value from $566,000 to just $39,000.

No wonder it’s open hunting season for moon snails. Not that there’s anything dramatic about such an enterprise. At least not the kind of mayhem stuff required in a sci-fi thriller. Even the invasion itself, of countless innocuous-looking snails and their small egg cases resembling little more than small pieces of rubber scattered across the mudflats like litter, isn’t likely to evoke any Alfred Hitchcock-ian scene from “The Birds.” Still, it’s serious business, and, obvious mayhem aside, it’s got some clammers quaking in their waders. Rather than raking up their usual numbers of clams, they’ve now, in an offensive-defense maneuver, turned to gathering the snails’ volcano-shaped egg cases, some of which can hold more than one million eggs (!), and are likely to show up wherever they dig. So far this summer alone, more than 90,000 egg cases have been retrieved in Lubec.

Which has got some people there wondering. The diggers have been dumping the dead snails and egg cases on their gardens as fertilizer, but might there not be some other use for them? Might not moon snails be processed, packaged, sold? “There’s got to be a market for moon snails somewhere in the world,” one clammer told the AP.  

Indeed. But that would be the movie sequel, no? Meanwhile, someone cue the “Jaws” music.