Saving Seafood

Northern Edge: Council Adopts Goal, Objectives for Action to Consider Scallop Access to Tip of Georges Bank Closed Area II

April 26, 2023 —  The following was released by the New England Fishery Management Council:

The New England Fishery Management Council has initiated a management action to consider allowing scallop fishery access into the habitat management area (HMA) on the Northern Edge of Georges Bank.

During its April 18-20, 2023 meeting in Mystic, Connecticut, the Council first approved a goal and objectives for this action and then initiated a habitat-scallop framework to develop a range of alternatives that will continue to address habitat protection while balancing controlled harvest of the valuable scallop resource within the HMA.

The Closed Area II Habitat Management Area covers a large part of what is commonly referred to as the Northern Edge of Georges Bank (see map below). It has the same boundaries as the Council’s Habitat Area of Particular Concern (HAPC) in Closed Area II and is designated in regulation as the Habitat Closure Area.

 

MAINE: More than a job: Can sea scallop help preserve the working waterfront?

March 30, 2023 — At the beginning of Andrew Peters’ first Econ 101 class at elite Middlebury College in 2005, the professor asked students to introduce themselves and share their career interests. “Law,” “technology,” and “investment banking” echoed among the 80 or so in the lecture hall, with one stand-out. “Lobsterman,” Peters stated.

It was a goal the Albany native had fixed on as a 12-year-old during a family sailing trip and, although he eventually worked for several years as a sternman, the profession proved out of reach because of the limited number of commercial lobstering licenses in Maine.  A job at Google would have been easier to nab. 

But now Andrew Peters is making his way on the water in a role that defines entrepreneurship. He is one of just a handful of ocean farmers growing sea scallops in Maine. If his econ professor were to illustrate his vocation as a Venn diagram, it would lie at the intersection of passion, hard work, and innovation.

Peters’ foray into sea scallop aquaculture comes as the future of Maine’s $730 million lobster industry faces serious challenges, including northward lobster migrations due to warming waters and federal regulations of gear related to right whale entanglements. But at the same time, fisheries are diversifying with bivalve and kelp farming, and the economy has been invigorated with an influx of Millennials, including remote workers who permanently fled cities to Maine’s great outdoors and more affordable real estate during the pandemic. Despite wariness about the lobster fishery, there’s a sparkle in Maine’s Blue Economy.

Read the full article at Aquaculture North America

Scientists Scramble to Help Bay Scallops Survive Climate Change

March 27, 2023 — Stephen Tettelbach was surveying the bay scallop population in Nantucket with colleagues late in the summer of 2019 when he got the call: A longtime friend and fisherman on Long Island reported a mass die-off of scallops in Peconic Bay, Long Island’s legendary fishery.

Tettelbach, head of the Peconic Bay Scallop Restoration Program at Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) in Suffolk County, New York, said his first response was denial. Peconic Bay’s prized shellfish had been thriving in June. In fact, it was supposed to be another banner season—commercial landings in the two preceding years had been the largest since 1994, topping 110,000 pounds.

But after returning to Long Island a few days later and setting out on his annual October surveys of Peconic Bay, an estuary nestled between eastern Long Island’s North and South Forks known for its pristine waters, lush eelgrass meadows, and scallops considered to be the best in the country, Tettelbach saw the devastation for himself. “There were almost no living scallops anywhere,” he remembers.

Once the country’s leading bay scallop fishery, Peconic Bay is now holding on for dear life. 2019 marked the first in a series of die-offs that has led to the collapse of one of the few remaining fisheries of wild bay scallops, whose native East Coast populations have declined dramatically in recent decades.

Coastal change in the Northeast is fast outpacing other areas, with summer water temperatures increasing at a rate more than twice the global average, according to research published in Global Change Biology in January.

Read the full article at Civil Eats

US Northeast scallop supply staying flat but market will be tough to predict

March 21, 2023 — The scallop market will be hard to predict in 2023 as supplies stay flat and demand becomes the main influence on pricing pressure, Northern Wind CEO Ken Melanson told SeafoodSource.

Melanson, addressing the topic at the 2023 Seafood Expo North America, on behalf of his New Bedford, Massachusetts, U.S.A. company, said scallop prices haven’t followed their typical trajectory given the flat supply.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Scallops dying off in Long Island are ‘a cautionary tale’ for New England

January 24, 2023 — Once one of the largest fisheries on the East Coast, Peconic Bay scallops have faced near complete die-offs on Long Island since 2019.

A study by Stony Brook University shows this could be a cautionary tale for New England.

Christopher Gobler, a co-author and endowed chair of coastal ecology and conservation in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, used satellite thermal imaging and recorded scallop heartbeats to measure how less oxygen and warming waters put stress on shellfish populations.

Data shows over the past two decades, the Peconic Bay estuary — and the entire Northeast — are warming at rates during summer that far exceed global average; Gobler said, “about threefold higher.”

Read the full article at wbur

MAINE: Scallopers meet with DMR on tweaks to the commercial fishery

January 24, 2023 — Fishermen have seen sea scallops stacked on top of one another in flush beds on the ocean floor and then vanish time and again throughout the decades of commercial fishing. In 2009, when stocks and landings fell concerningly low in what had been hot spots, fishermen agreed to a Department of Marine Resources (DMR) request to close some areas for three years. Then, after more than 60 meetings with fishermen, led by the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, in Stonington, a 10-year state management plan was adopted in 2012.

State waters were divided into three scallop fishing zones, with Zones 1 and 3 operated under limited access areas and designated open fishing days for divers and draggers, while a three-year rotation of fishing sites was used in Zone 2. As a whole, scallopers were on board, even though it meant operating under rules that limited when and where draggers and divers could fish.

With that plan at an end, Melissa Smith, the DMR’s resource coordinator for scallops, met with scallopers in January in all three zones to get input to tweak the plan. However, changes to the Zone 2 rotational plan were the main discussion.

“I think we’ve got a hard-fought battle ahead of us,” said Machiasport fisherman Mike Murphy, who has fished under the Zone 2 rotation for a decade. He said he had been willing to try the rotational management plan when it was floated over 10 years ago. But scallop areas change with time all along the Maine coast and so does the fishermen’s catch. Now Murphy is not so sure, after experiencing crowded fishing spots in the open areas, something that also depletes the stock.

“You put 70 boats [in one spot] and we’re going to clear it,” he said. “A lot of us want to see the whole rotational management thing go away. That’s going to be our battle.”

Read the full article at Mount Desert Islander

Summer heat waves and low oxygen prove deadly for bay scallops as a New York fishery collapses

January 20, 2023 — A new study by Stony Brook University researchers published in Global Change Biology demonstrates that warming waters and heat waves have contributed to the loss of an economically and culturally important fishery, the production of bay scallops. As climate change intensifies, heat waves are becoming more and more common across the globe. In the face of such repeated events, animals will acclimate, migrate, or perish.

Since 2019, consecutive summer mass die-offs of bay scallops in the Peconic Estuary on Long Island, New York, have led to the collapse of the bay scallop fishery in New York and the declaration of a federal fishery disaster, with landings down more than 99 percent.

This study led by Stony Brook School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences graduate Stephen Tomasetti, Ph.D., and Stony Brook University Endowed Chair of Coastal Ecology and Conservation Christopher Gobler, Ph.D., and a collaborative team of researchers reveals that extreme summer temperatures, becoming more frequent under climate change, exacerbate the vulnerability of bay scallops to environmental stress and has played a role in the recurrent population crashes.

Read the full article at phys.org

MAINE: Maine’s scallop industry is offering fishermen new opportunities at sea

January 13, 2023 — Maine’s fishermen are facing numerous threats from climate change and changing ecosystems, and aquaculture offers a solution. The state’s wild fisheries have become very focused on the lobster industry, but farming sea scallops gives an opportunity to diversify the seafood harvesting business and increase resiliency for coastal communities built around seafood production.

The scallop aquaculture community is unique to Maine and composed of a variety of people and organisations, including fishermen farmers, marine extension programmes, community development financial institutions and research and outreach foundations.

Read the full article at The Fish Site

MAINE: As Maine’s climate continues to change, so does its growing scallop farming industry

January 10, 2023 — When you work on the water in Maine, the cold months make for hit-or-miss days.

For Andrew Peters and his three-person crew, undocking from Buck’s Harbor Marina in Brooksville to tend to their scallops is a year-round venture.

It takes about 45 minutes by boat to get to the scallop farm. Along the way, Peters’ crew counts and cleans small scallops. The ones he was monitoring in in December were about an inch or so and needed another two years to grow to market size.

“All my life I wanted to work on the water and make a living working on the water, and when I was younger, I wanted to be a lobsterman,” Peters said while steering the boat through islets on Penobscot Bay.

Peters, who grew up in New York, said he lived near Portland and worked as a sternman on a lobster boat. He wanted to be a captain himself.

“I’ve been on a waitlist for eight years, and within the last 10 years I’ve realized there are other ways to make a living on the water and one day is to scallop farm,” Peters said.

But when you eat a scallop from Maine, chances are you are eating a wild caught scallop. The harvest of wild scallops happens normally in winter. Scallops also take a long time to grow, sometimes two to three years to reach a marketable size.

Read the full article at News Center Maine