In the early 1990s, residents of Ucunivanua Village, on the eastern coast of Fiji’s largest island, realized that the marine resources they depended on were becoming scarce. Village elders remembered when a woman could collect several bags of large kaikoso clams—a food staple and important source of income—in just a few hours. By the 1990s, however, a woman could spend all day on the mudflats and come home with only half a bag of small clams. The decline of Ucunivanua’s marine heritage reflects a larger pattern of depletion repeated throughout the Fiji islands.

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