“The greatest news is the younger generation has found a large set of big scallops, and is what the baymen call the finest kind,” Capt. Milton Miller, age 95, wrote in a letter that appears in the letters to the editor section of The Star this week.
A series of algal blooms that began to plague the Peconic Estuary in the mid-1980s virtually wiped out the once vibrant resource. “The baymen are able to catch their limit with a short time. This has just proven true what the old-timers told me when I was a young boy: that fish and shellfish come and go in cycles. The first settlers were told about this phenomenon by the American Indians. My father gave this knowledge to me and it passed down from generation to generation,” Captain Miller wrote.
Steven Tettlebach, a professor of marine science at C.W. Post College and an active participant in Suffolk County’s efforts to restore the scallop population to health, said yesterday that news of scallops showing up in places where they have not been seen in years had begun to filter in.
Not discounting Captain Miller’s cycle theory, he said, “My feeling is the population has rebuilt to a critical mass we have been trying to get to for years. We’re seeing areas of set and harvest not seen since before the brown tides. With more subpopulations reaching spawning density, larvae have been transported to different places. This is typical for bay scallops that have a short lifespan.”
Mr. Tettlebach said the process of small populations causing disparate settlements was like “lights blinking on and off. Now more of the lights are blinking on.”
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