Fiji Giant Clam Project

This project - a collaboration between ACIAR and the (as it was known then) Fisheries Division of the Fiji Ministry of Primary Industries - got me into fisheries work. Before the Clam Project I was a population geneticist working in the field of forest pathology. 

I just happened to be in Fiji, between finishing my postdoctoral visiting fellow project at the University of the South Pacific and waiting for Rani to finish her teaching contract at Suva Muslim Secondary School, before regretfully departing back to the UK, when I saw a project job advertised in the Fiji Times. Must be able to dive, it said. Must have experience in field surveys of sedentary organisms, it said. Must be able to manage finances and write reports, it said. I checked all three boxes: trees and their pathogens are pretty sedentary, and I already had some projects under my belt and publications to my name, besides being a paid-up member of the Suva branch of the British Sub Aqua Club (BSAC).

And so I became a government Fisheries Officer. My salary was about a third of my Exeter University postdoc project salary, but I loved the work and it provided a doorway into an entirely new career - one that led me, via snorkelling most of way around most of the remote reefs of Fiji, through a couple of military coups, and a revolution in tuna fisheries management, to the dizzy height of Director.  

But that is another story.

Actually, this blog is just a vehicle to house the summary report of three years work (1984-1987) by the Fiji Giant Clam Project which I recently unearthed in a box of old papers in my parents' house, scanned, and knitted roughly together. I can't see this anywhere else on the web and thought it might be useful to anyone currently looking at Fiji reef invertebrates. 

You can download it here - PDF approx 8.5 megabytes. And I must thank Kim Friedman for selflessly repaginating it for me. 

This is a summary report. It condenses a number of more detailed field and lab reports, however I don't possess copies of these (apart from one, from the last half of 1985, available here). Possibly ACIAR still has copies of the 6-monthly reports, possibly the Fiji Government Archives.

The 2017 ACIAR publication: Giant Clams and Unexpected Impacts, provides a lead-in to the full scope of this multi-country project.