Saving Seafood

FLORIDA: Gulf County scallop season could be shut down this season

April 28, 2016 — GULF COUNTY, Fla. — Scalloping is a major part of the tourism economy in Gulf County, but this year they may have to do without.

The culprit is red tide. Officials with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission say in the 18 years they’ve been monitoring scallops, they’ve never had to cancel the season. This year it’s looking like it may come to that.

“Most people like doing it because it’s an underwater Easter egg hunt and it’s just a great way to spend the day,” said Local Dusty May.

On Wednesday, the FWC held a meeting to discuss whether to cancel the scalloping season all together.

“Bay scallops were negatively impacted by the red tide that came last year,” said Amanda Nalley, Spokesperson for FWC. “It did come during a time that was very important to scallops. It was during the spawning season and when larva was in the water, so that is why the scallop population was affected.”

Read the full story at NBC Gulf County

FLORIDA: Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission could close scallops in St. Joe Bay for 2 years

April 27, 2016 — The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is considering closing scallop season for two years. The issue will be discussed at a meeting tonight.

“Scientific monitoring of bay scallops in St. Joseph Bay indicates that the bay scallop population has declined severely due to impacts of red tide. As a result, the bay scallop population is too low to sustain and recover from an open season for scalloping this summer,” officials wrote in a news release. “To help ensure the bay scallop population can recover as quickly as possible, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) is making arrangements to cancel the 2016 harvest season in state waters west of St. Vincent Island including St. Joseph Bay.”

Read the full story at myPanhandle.com

VIRGINIA: Rediscovering a taste for Chesapeake scallops

April 18, 2016 — The Croxton cousins want to do for the Chesapeake Bay scallop what they helped do for its oyster: bring it back from the brink with bivalve farming and some savvy marketing.

That was the idea behind an event last night where the co-owners of Rappahannock Oyster Co. offered an early taste of the Bay scallops they hope to grow into a new commercial product. After successfully cultivating a small crop of the scallops, which take up to six months to become bite-size, Ryan and Travis Croxton hope to begin selling the shellfish at their four restaurants and elsewhere in the fall.

“They’ve been extinct (in the Bay) since 1933,” Travis Croxton said at the event. “We just found that out a couple years ago and thought—we love scallops, we love the Chesapeake Bay, let’s reintroduce them.”

The work they heard about was that of scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, who have been quietly restoring a small Bay scallops population at their Gloucester Point facility since the late 1990s.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

MASSACHUSETTS: When the Bay Scallops Beckon, Time and Tide Wait for No Man

November 5, 2015 — Hathaway is a big family name on the Edgartown waterfront. And among them all, Dick Hathaway is a legend. There are many stories that circulate around this hardworking, hard headed, crusty fellow, but no one questions one fact: Dick Hathaway loves to go fishing for bay scallops. At 87 years of age, he was the eldest on Cape Pogue Pond on Monday morning, the opening day of the commercial bay scalloping season.

Dick Hathaway fishes now with his younger cousin, Mike Hathaway. On Monday they were up and out early. Dick’s wife Janice was up early too, well before sunrise, making him a sandwich and putting it in his small cooler.

By 9 a.m., there were close to 40 fishermen out on the pond.

Dick’s earliest memory of scalloping goes back to when he was a kid, just old enough to go commercial fishing. He worked side by side with his uncle. “I went with Lewis Hathaway,” he said. “We were in Anthier’s Pond [Sengekontacket].They didn’t allow motors in the pond.”

In those days they used dip nets, wind and the power of the hand. They rowed.

To harvest the bay scallops, Lewis tossed the drag off the stern of the skiff, Dick said.“He’d hand me the line and I’d go to the bow and pull in the drag.”

Today shellfishermen use powerful outboard motors. Most boats have a winch that is powered by a gas motor to help raise the drag from the bottom.

Read the full story at Vineyard Gazette

 

Using Science to Save Bay Scallops

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.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal

 

Tide turns for Florida bay scallops, restoration continues in Tarpon Bay

July 31, 2015 — Standing in the chest-deep water of Tarpon Bay this week, Eric Milbrandt handed a cage full of bay scallops to Sarah Bridenbaugh aboard a Carolina Skiff.

Milbrandt, director of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation Marine Laboratory, and research assistant Bridenbaugh weren’t harvesting the tasty mollusks (harvesting bay scallops south of the Pasco-Hernando county line is illegal).

Instead, the caged scallops would be cleaned, counted and measured by Bridenbaugh and interns Krystal Silas, Emily Anderson and Chrissy McCrimmon for an ongoing scallop restoration project.

“Old-timers talk about collecting buckets of scallops in the 1950s and ’60s,” Milbrant said. “What we’re trying to do is re-establish a local population of scallops. We’d like to see a population that can sustain a recreational harvest, but we’re quite a long way from that.”

Read the full story at the News-Press