August 13, 2015 — MILFORD, Conn.—Five-month-old bay scallops, each roughly the size of a quarter, fluttered through the murky water like miniature UFOs.
“You see them swimming?” said Sheila Stiles, a geneticist at the Milford Laboratory, where hundreds of scallops are being raised in aquaculture tanks with water pumped in from Long Island Sound.
The population of bay scallops, a smaller relative of sea scallops, has been dwindling in U.S. waters for decades. The Milford Laboratory is trying to bring them back by breeding the shellfish that are most likely to survive and reproduce in the wild.
“What we are trying to do is rebuild or restore the populations and using genetic approaches,” said Gary Wikfors, biotechnology branch chief at the lab, which is part of the federal Northeast Fisheries Science Center.
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