When Peconic Baykeeper opened its recent panel discussion on the this year’s scallop season to public input, local baymen shared their firsthand experiences dealing with depleted populations of harvestable shellfish in what is another poor year for scallops.
“No one wants to see the bay scallop survive more than the baymen do,” said one who had followed his father into the profession. “My pay,” he said, “was a pack of Pokemon cards back in the day.”
Since 2019, Peconic Bay scallops have suffered from a die-off attributed to a parasitic infection. This is not the first time a die-off has struck locally; in 1986, brown tide hit, drastically impacting the scallop population for around 20 years, according to a graph presented at the Dec. 18 discussion at the Cutchogue New Suffolk Free Library.
The baymen floated their thoughts about the most recent die-off, asking the panelists about chemical runoff from farms and vineyards, which the baymen theorized could be harming eelgrass, a home for scallops.
While the panelists did not directly weigh in on that assertion, Stephen Tettelbach, a shellfish ecologist with Cornell Cooperative Extension, said “we certainly hear you,” and briefly discussed the effect of water temperature on eelgrass, which he said has not grown west of Shelter Island for decades.
“There’s been some pretty significant glimmers of hope — only to have our hopes dashed again,” Peconic Baykeeper’s executive director, Pete Topping, said at the start of the discussion. The scallop is the “icon” of the Peconic Estuary’s “biological identity,” he added about the importance of restoration efforts.
Dr. Tettelbach then walked through the history of harvests and die-offs, which struck first during the 1930s when eelgrass meadows were “decimated” by a disease.
When the brown tide hit in the 1980s, the landings were “almost nonexistent: 300 pounds compared to 300,000 pounds.” Some relief came in 1994 when the harvests briefly rebounded, before cratering once more.
At the time, researchers had difficulty establishing restoration efforts because “it’s hard to get funding to do restoration when you have something that’s killing them every year.” That is, until 2005, when the Cornell Cooperative Extension began its bay scallop restoration program.
“I wanted to see the fishery come back for all the people whose livelihoods depended so heavily on bay scallops,” Dr. Tettelbach said. With that, he added, they helped bring $60 million back to the local economy with a portion of that money going to the baymen.
Onscreen, the panelists had a graph tracking pounds of harvested scallop meat from 1997 to 2018. In 2006, baymen reported around 1,000 pounds of meat, it showed. By 2018, that number had risen to around 100,000. Then came the 2019 die-off.
Harrison Tobi has been working with the Cornell Cooperative Extension for the past three-plus years, focusing on bringing scallops back as an economically viable resource for baymen.
Addressing the audience, Mr. Tobi went over some of his recent findings. Essentially, his team of researchers has identified genetic diversity as a central cause of the die-offs and potentially a key for restoration efforts.
“We have seen some very, very hopeful results,” Mr. Tobi said. With a lack of stock enhancement in the Peconic Bay, i.e., supplementing existing populations with new populations, the scallop population became too “inbred” over time. Nearby scallop populations in Moriches Bay, however, have grown in recent years.
Mr. Tobi hopes that Moriches Bay scallops can help augment the genetic diversity of Peconic Bay scallops, creating a healthier organism. With that, “it could take a couple of years to really see the benefits,” he said, but the goal is to create a “more disease-tolerant” population.
“We believe the parasite has been there for quite some time,” said Bassem Allam, a marine science professor at Stony Brook University. Later, when asked where the parasite originated, he pointed to a study from 1984 that looked like “what we are seeing today” with the parasite.
The organism has also been identified by Martha’s Vineyard, he said, but scientists aren’t entirely sure if it’s the same variant: “Now, with Covid, we know how variants can pop up in different places.”
Stephen Heck, a Ph.D. candidate in marine science at Stony Brook University, drew comparisons between the Peconic Bay scallops and shellfish farther north. In Nantucket, bay scallop restoration efforts began in 2010. Since then, there has been a 360-percent increase in scallop seed, leading to a 27-percent increase in adult scallops.
“We can learn a lot from both to help restore bay scallop populations here and prevent future decline amongst the populations in Nantucket,” Mr. Heck said, before bringing up the population increases in Moriches Bay.
Matt Ketcham of Peconic Gold Oysters offered his own perspective on the issue.
“I’m not a doctor,” said Mr. Ketcham, adding later, “I have more questions than answers.” But, he added, “maybe the mild winters are aging those scallops a little more.” In the past, he said, they have had “great scalloping” after hot summers, seemingly ruling that out as an issue.
Due to the die-offs, scallops have not been surviving until September, Mr. Ketcham said. As for harvesting the shellfish early, in August, there is not enough meat on the shell at that point for them to be a viable resource.
Later, when the moderator, Alexa Annunziata, asked Mr. Tobi and other panelists what they would like scallopers to know about their work, he again pointed to the Moriches Bay scallops, saying he hopes “we’ll start to see those genetics passed down” to Peconic Bay scallops. Two years ago, there were no commercial landings reported to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation from Moriches Bay, which means that the population there is growing, despite the parasite.