Feds Declare Peconic Bay Scallops A Disaster

The U.S. Department of Commerce has declared the Peconic Bay scallop a fishery disaster, making baymen who rely on the harvest of the scallops for income and the efforts to restore the scallop stocks eligible for federal disaster aid.

In a statement from Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo last week, the collapse of the bay scallop population on the East End in 2019 and 2020 was one of four fisheries around the country that saw catastrophic collapses that impacted fishermen’s incomes and qualified as disasters worthy of federal assistance.

The disaster declaration had been requested by Governor Andrew Cuomo following a conference of scientists and government officials that explored the possible causes of the mysterious 2019 die-off, which saw as many as 95 percent of the adult bay scallops in the Peconic Bay Estuary die during the summer months.

The small community of baymen who harvest the scallops had been seeing growing harvests over the last decade and had sold some $1.6 million worth of scallops harvested from the bays in the year before the 2019 die-off.

In addition to fishermen being able to apply for economic assistance, the federal disaster aid could be directed to help fund efforts to restore the shellfish, which have proven difficult to simply re-seed from hatcheries, and combat factors that contributed to the collapse.

Marine biologists have said that the cause of the massive die-off, which repeated itself in 2020, appears to be a combination of stresses on the scallops exacerbated by extremely high water temperatures in the estuary, which stretches from the Peconic River to Orient and Montauk.

The bay has seen record water temperatures in the last two years and has seen a steady increasing in the number of days each summer that water temperatures are well above what is thought to be harmful and even deadly to the scallops. Scientists have said that the increasing temperatures in the region means the period of very warm waters in the bay is now overlapping with the scallops’ July spawning habits, a time when they are left in a weakened state. Other factors like algae blooms and a shellfish parasite that both thrive in warmer waters are also thought to be contributing to the mortality of the valuable but fragile shellfish.

The other three fisheries that were declared disasters were on the West Coast: two were salmon fisheries in the Washington State and the other was a crab fishery in Alaska.