Saving Seafood

NEW YORK: Effort to salvage juvenile scallops called off for lack of candidates

November 22, 2019 — An unprecedented effort by conservationists, baymen and the state to save a vulnerable population of juvenile scallops by transferring them to deeper waters has been called off after only a day because of a lack of mollusks to move.

In response to a scallop die-off, the state Department of Environmental Conservation moved quickly last week to approve a new Scallop Salvage and Relay permit to allow vulnerable scallops in an area of water near Orient Harbor to be transferred to deeper, safer waters, with the hope they’d survive and spawn next summer.

Stephen Tettelbach, an ecologist at the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s marine program, worked with the state and lined up five commercial scallop fishermen to dredge the area for juveniles to move earlier this week.

“The baymen went out, they dredged for hours and hours and got very few,” said Tettelbach, adding the numbers were not enough to continue the program. “There were still a good number of scallops, but not as many as we saw a month ago.”

Read the full story at Newsday

NOAA grants SMAST $1.6 million for monkfish study

June 9, 2016 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass — Researchers at the UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology have won a federal grant valued at $1.6 million to conduct research into the growth and movement of monkfish, NOAA announced Tuesday.

The grant is part of a unique “research set-aside” program that pays for at-sea research not with direct dollars but with fishing opportunities whose proceeds pay for the researchers and for the boat they are using.

In the case of SMAST, where Dr. Steven Cadrin and research technician Crista Bank will be doing the study, 250 days at sea allocated in the grant each year for 2016 and 2017 should produce $1.361 million to pay for the boat and $270,000 for the research over two years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The research set-aside program began with scallops, according to Ryan Silva of NOAA. “There are no federal funds awarded, instead there are fisheries resources,” he told The Standard-Times

Cornell University also won an award that is slightly larger than that of SMAST.

Silva said that the research set-asides are the concept of the New England Fisheries Management Council, and are unique to the Northeast fishery. “Periodically we hear from other regions,” he said, but to date none have duplicated this program.

NOAA said in its announcement that “SMAST will tag juvenile monkfish to improve monkfish growth estimates, a critical parameter for the model used in the monkfish stock assessment.”

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times