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What many had hoped would be one of the most bountiful bay scallop seasons in a decade started on Monday morning with a mixed bushel basket of success, optimism, disappointment and worry.
After two days of harvesting, professional baymen and recreational scallopers reported finding large numbers of scallops in some areas, with limits—one bushel per man for amateurs, 10 bushels per for professionals—easy to come by. But many also reported smaller than expected densities and lots of large, empty scallop shells—a sign that the many of the huge numbers of scallops seen last winter and spring died on the bay bottoms in the interim.
“Looking at the size of the empty shells, they’re dying in June or maybe early July,” said Sam Rispoli, a bayman.
Some baymen are pointing to the widespread emergence of the toxic red tide algae in the East End’s bays in recent years as the possible culprit for the most recent die-off.
“When I left scalloping last winter, it looked like it was going to be a fantastic season—we were pulling up our dredges and there were 100 to 150 baby scallops in them,” said Ed Warner Jr., a Southampton Town Trustee and professional bayman from Hampton Bays. “But they didn’t transition from bugs to the adult stage, I guess. A lot of guys are blaming it on the red tide, but we don’t know that was the problem.”
Peconic Bay scallops, once so numerous their annual harvest supported hundreds of local families, were famously wiped out by the brown tide algae blooms in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Harvests of 300,000 pounds and more dwindled to just a few hundred pounds in some years.
The brown tide algae species killed scallops because the delicate shellfish would not eat when enveloped by it and slowly starved to death. The red tide, which has been present in local bays for several years but has exploded in range and density in the last two summers, poses a more immediate threat because scientists have found it to be toxic and deadly to fish and shellfish in a matter of hours. The algae also tends to sink to the bottom of the water column, where scallops and other shellfish live, at night. The algae appears in mid to late August and has persisted in recent years until October.
But those on the water say whatever the cause of the large number of dead scallops, many also survived and the season looks to be on par or only slightly behind last year’s harvest, which was a good one in comparison to most years since the last bumper crop in 1995.
“It’s nothing like it used to be,” Mr. Rispoli said. “But in light of the fact that there were so many years when there weren’t really any at all, it’s looking up.”
Mr. Rispoli, a former president of the Southampton Town Bayman’s Association, said there are a couple of other promising signs from the scallop stocks this year. While there may have been more scallops in numbers last year, they are more widespread throughout the bays this year, he said—possibly another product of there having been much larger numbers of scallops earlier this year. There are also once again large numbers of baby scallops, this year’s “bugs,” in the water, though whether they will survive to adulthood, remains to be seen.
The densest concentrations of scallops thus far have been coming from the northern shores of the Peconics. More than 80 boats were working the historically bountiful grounds around Robins Island on Tuesday and dozens more were spread out in the creeks and harbors along the North Fork, particularly in Orient.
Mr. Warner said that another promising sign from this year’s early harvest is that there appears to be a good number of scallops in Shinnecock Bay, but that no baymen have been harvesting them yet because beds of eelgrass are so dense one could not pull a scallop dredge through them.
The disappearance of vast eelgrass beds from the bays in the mid-1990s has been widely blamed for the continued annual failures of scallops to rebound. The small shellfish attach themselves to the plant’s fronds when they are young to keep themselves away from predators like crabs.
With good numbers of scallops coming in to seafood shops and harvesters in Nantucket and Cape Cod having good years as well, the retail price for local bay scallops was between $18 and $25 a pound on Tuesday evening—a function of both supply and of demand.
“We’re charging $20 a pound. It’s a lot cheaper than last year,” said James Coronesi, owner of Cor-J Seafood in Hampton Bays. “With this economy, I don’t know if we could move any volume with the prices we had last year.”
Mr. Warner said the number of scallops does appear to be enough to keep the full-time baymen left in the area working through the winter—the season continues through March 31—and that if the current $14 a pound wholesale price holds up, many baymen will. “It’s not a bumper crop,” he said. “But there’s going to be something to work on.”
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Regrettably, the estuary bays will continue their gradual decline as marine habitat until they will be just a water medium upon which boats and ski-doos race, otherwise devoid of life.
The only chance to prevent this eventuality is for the state and federal governments to become involved. Only they have the authority, the financial resources and the objective viewpoints to overcome local resistance.
It is the NYS DEC that will soon prevent recreational boaters from discharging their ordure into the bays. If a study is done that shows, irrefutably, that current practices by the local population are killing the bays, the state might take action. But that is far away on the horizon.
Total comments by highhatsize: 303
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