November 5, 2012 — Why aren't scallops more popular than oysters, shrimp and clams? Why do other molluscs — not to mention crustaceans — get all the attention?
Price has a lot to do with that. Scallops are less plentiful than those other creatures in the wild, and far less commonly farmed. Although the spendiest, most sustainable scallops are hand-plucked by SCUBA divers off the sea floor, "the majority of wild scallops are caught using a fishing gear called a New Bedford dredge, which is a fifteen-foot-wide steel frame that is used to drag a chain bag along the seafloor," explains conservationist Gib Brogan, Northeast representative of the nonprofit Oceana
Having spent nearly a decade striving to reform the Atlantic scallop fishery, whose 300-plus boats now catch over $500 million worth of scallops every year, Brogan doesn't love the New Bedford dredge:
"The frame suspends the scallops in the water, where they are caught in the bag. This gear has significant impacts on the sea floor and results in significant catch of species other than scallops including flounder, monkfish and skates. The gear has a history of catching threatened and endangered sea turtles, but will be required to be modified in the near future to reduce turtle catch."
Scallop farming — common in Asia, but still only experimental in US waters — presents a far safer, more affordable alternative. The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch gives farmed scallops its top rating — higher even than that of most diver-caught scallops. And while shrimp farming is notoriously unsustainable, scallop farming is a totally different story, says ecologist Carl Safina, founder of the Blue Ocean Institute:
"It's pretty simple: When you farm shrimp, you have to clear out wetland areas to create the farms. Then you have shrimp crowded together at an unnatural density. This results in total destruction of those wetlands."
Shrimps have to be fed.
"But bivalves — clams, oysters, scallops — make a living by filtering their food out of the water. If anything, while being farmed they would go back to performing their natural environmental service of filtering, which lets more light into the water for sea-floor plants and can bring an area back closer to the way it's supposed to be. A shrimp farm is a very unnatural place, but a scallop farm is a remarkably natural place," Safina told me while preparing to cook — on a wood-burning stove — scallops he had hand-harvested himself and stored in his freezer, which lost power along with the rest of his Long Island house during Hurricane Sandy.
Raising the number of American scallop farms could boost the economy, provide jobs, and lower the price of this master mollusc.
Read the full story at the Huffington Post