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.