July 1, 2015 — Scallop fishermen off the East Coast could soon see one of their biggest bumper crops ever. A federal survey in waters off Delaware is predicting a boom in the next couple of years for the nation’s most valuable fishery.
Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looks for young sea scallops on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This year, when they stuck their camera in the water, they got a huge shock, says Dvora Hart, a research analyst with NOAA’s Fisheries Service.
“We were seeing concentrations of several hundred per square meter, and to give a perspective on that, one per square meter is actually a high concentration,” says Hart.
Hart estimates they saw about 10 billion scallops off Delaware and southern New Jersey alone — probably due to increased spawning at a closed fishing area farther north. The closure of the fishing area gave the scallops more time to spawn — which they do each spring and fall. The larvae floated downstream and became the billions of scallops Hart saw in the mid-Atlantic this year. Closures like this are designed to boost spawning but “some years have more luck than others,” Hart says.