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or 20 minutes my camera lens has been
trained on a blue antenna the size of a
cat’s whisker. It’s all I can see of a rarely
seen shrimp that lives exclusively inside
the gills of giant clams (
Tridacna gigas
),
the largest bivalves on Earth. The one-
inch shrimp, as white as the milky tissue of the clam it
inhabits, wasn’t easy to find. Yan, my friend and dive guide,
spent the week looking inside every clam we passed, and
this is the first shrimp he found. So I am happy to remain
right where I am until the air in my tank runs low or I
finally get a shot of an animal I’ve been tracking for years.
By Raja Ampat standards the clam I’m kneeling next
to isn’t large, maybe 20 inches at most — nothing like
the colossus I was introduced to a decade earlier by
liveaboard cruise director and diving pioneer Larry Smith.
* * * * *
It was our first trip to that region of Indonesia, and
Larry, always full of himself, kept carrying on about
a gigantic clam he had recently discovered. His
unrequited enthusiasm got to the point that guests
lounging in the salon one evening began referring
to the object of his infatuation as “Larry’s Giant
Clam.” This was just the sort of thing Larry loved.
Disappearing into his cabin he returned waving a
tattered field guide. He tossed it on the table and
flipped through the pages until a series of bivalve
images appeared. Leaning myopically close to the page,
Larry read triumphantly, “maximum length 4½ feet.”
“Dagnabbit, that’s nothing — my clam will beat that
hands down,” he added in his singsong East Texas drawl.
And from that moment he was bewitched with the idea
that his clam would set a new world record. Who could
resist joining in such fun? Everyone aboard decided to
become part of the quest to measure Larry’s Giant Clam
for science, posterity and interplanetary acclaim.
So the next morning we backtracked to the lagoon
where Larry had found his clam. And sure enough
there it sat, upright and solitary, on a shallow white-
sand apron that spilled seaward from a coral thicket.
At first sight we were taken aback by the clam’s
huge size. No one doubted Larry any more as we
swam reverently around a pair of shells the size of a
bathtub. Eventually we inched forward and one by one
CLAMS AND FRIENDS
32
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FALL 2016
ENCOUNTERS
Text and photos by Ned and Anna DeLoach