Clams?
 

When I left the hobby about 4-5 years ago I used to see clams for sale a lot. Since I have been back for about 5-6 months...I have never seen a single one for sale. I really only visit one LFS regularly though (J&L) so maybe that is part of the reason. I'm sure the export ban from Indonesia ( I assume it also bans clams) is another but that happened months after I was back in the hobby.

Am I just really unlucky and missing them at shops or is there a reason?

yea they are becoming harder to come by now,

Indonesia has never issued Cites to export clams as far as i know so the current situation there will have no effect on clams.

J&L will be re stocked soon with some Crocea

The primary reason is new restrictions on importation making them more expensive and risky to import.

Clams from some areas I believe are banned altogether.

Lots of discussion on this site regarding CITES, etc as to why.

King Ed's has some questionable looking ones.

Expensive but they might color up nicely.

No, they're still easy to get. Just no store wants to stock 50+ pcs of clams to sell the 3-4/month that's been trending for the last five years.

Easy to get where?

From the regular sources that stores order from; transhippers and wholesalers.

J&L seems to bring them in once or twice a year now. They seem to sell when they do even though they are getting pricy and smaller than they used to be but hey, what isn't in the livestock world these days...

I mean, I dunno what to tell ya. I've turned down four opportunities to bring them in since the start of the year.

From TimT on another thread...

The reason most Canadian wholesalers won't import clams DIRECTLY from country of origin is that they legally can't. Since about a year ago the CFIA became involved. There is now a few extra steps involved and a lot more risk.
1. Import permit required by CFIA. If CFIA chooses they can inspect the shipment. If they think the mortality is too high they will have NO PROBLEMS DESTROYING THE WHOLE SHIPMENT. People make comments about burning $100 bills. How about burning a handful of $1000 bills?? I used to import clams direct from Tahiti. You don't want to know how stressful it is to wire a 5 digit sum of money to some guy in a remote part of the South Pacific where you have no chance of getting your money back should anything go wrong. ie Shipment sits in the sun for too long and the clams all spawn in the bag and/or come in gaping.
2. Country of export must have a trade agreement in place with Canada.
3. There must not be any reported disease outbreaks from the country of export.

The import permit is the easy part. Most of the countries that export clams do not have the necessary trade agreements in place. Last time I checked into this all the countries I used to buy from did not have agreements in place. As well, Tahiti had reported a disease outbreak of Perkinsus olseni(aka Mollusc Ick) in their oysters.

So this means that I can only buy from countries that have a trade agreement in place... being the US. Most of the larger wholesalers will get you a CITES re-export permit and then the necessary DEA health inspection. Then you need a US Fish and Wildlife export inspection. All told it costs between $400 to $500 USD to do the necessary paperwork for a shipment. Then you are paying US wholesale for the clams and tacking on another $400 -$500 in fees.

Cheers,
Tim

Check out the stores now, as per J&L website they got a bunch of croceas in.