About a half-hour before dawn on Sunday, my friend Hammer and I met in the Star parking lot to load into his pickup to go scalloping. We had read in The Star that it was not going to be a good year for scallops, and our low expectations were met.
Between us, we gathered seven mature scallops, barely enough for an appetizer, much less a meal. Yet as we looked around, we noticed that scores of young scallops, known as bugs locally, were all over the bottom of the harbor. This could be a positive indication about next fall, if enough of them survived — but this is a doubtful prospect, given recent history.
The Peconic Estuary Program says that commercial scallopers produced as much as 300,000 pounds of scallops a year before the brown tide algal blooms of the 1980s. Landings hit a low of around 300 pounds in 1987 and 1989, and then 53 pounds in 1996. Since then, scallops have come back strong some years and nearly not at all in others. Why remains something of a mystery.
Scallops live about two years, growing remarkably quickly. But the eelgrass crucial for wild-spawn scallops has been nearly lost from pollution, dredging, and sea level rise. The grass keeps young scallops off the bottom and away from predators; without it, they are prey to a host of threats. Instead of underwater expanses of green waving grass, harbor bottoms are now mostly sandy with gravel patches here and there and occasional spots with codium weed — hardly enough to protect scallops in their crucial early months.
Researchers suspect that a parasite most active when the water is warm may be the other main cause of the decline. Related recent studies have looked at the loss of genetic diversity, which could make scallops less resistant to the parasite, as well as other factors.
One promising effort has been to force hatchery scallops to spawn later in the season. The resulting bugs are distributed in the fall, when the parasite seems not to take hold. It is too soon to tell.
I learned recently that bay scallops went extinct along Virginia's Eastern Shore some time back. As here, algal blooms that cut the amount of sunlight reaching eelgrass beds was thought to have been a key factor. Restoration efforts continue, with mixed success.
With luck, the bugs we saw on Sunday will survive the winter to spawn in good numbers in the spring. With more luck, enough of them will be around in the following fall to make a meal and give baymen a financial boost. I won't count on it, though.