Tag Archives: Sea scallops
Could offshore wind plan hurt scallop fishermen? New Bedford official has ‘grave concerns’
New Bedford Port Authority Executive Director Gordon Carr has “grave concern” for the scallop fishing industry in the face of a potential new call area to be leased out to offshore wind projects. The 13,476,805-acre area off of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, dubbed the “Central Atlantic 2” call area, encompasses a large portion of key scalloping grounds, Carr wrote. Scalloper Keith Uzzell, who’s fished out of New Bedford and Fairhaven for 16 years, says he and others that frequent fishing grounds around the northeast started noticing “more survey boats, more offshore wind vessel activity” around the same time they noticed an uptick in things like dead whale sightings and empty scallop shells. more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 08:46
2024 Sea Scallop Survey Results – Long-Running Sea Scallop Survey Diversifies for the Future
Among the highlights of our 2024 Integrated Sea Scallop and HabCam Research Survey are strong numbers of two-year-old scallops observed in both dredge samples and HabCam images. These were found in the southern part of the Great South Channel, the eastern portion of the Nantucket Lightship Area, the northern portion of Closed Area I, and in the Elephant Trunk and Hudson Canyon South areas in the Mid-Atlantic. Sea scallops typically reach harvestable size at about age 4 and older. This is also the first survey that included three cruises, exclusively used a commercial vessel for dredging, and deployed a long-range autonomous underwater vehicle (LRAUV). Photos, charts, more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 10:06
Long-Running Sea Scallop Survey Diversifies for the Future – >>CLICK TO READ<<
There are only a handful of scallop farms in the United States, but most are in Maine.
Marsden Brewer kicked a 38-foot lobster boat into the middle of Penobscot Bay. Brewer and his son Bob pulled up a long net covered with algae and scooped scallops into a bucket of seawater. There, the bivalves moved much faster than I had imagined. Most go to Gliden Point Oyster Farm. The rest was about to be lunch. Brewer, a third-generation commercial fisherman, has witnessed the instability of the wild fisheries around him, witnessing fluctuations in the catch of red-spotted shrimp and the scarcity of cod, sea urchin and shrimp stocks that were once abundant. I witnessed. >click to read< 09:10
New Bedford is America’s number 1 fishing port for 20th straight year
The National Marine Fisheries Service released its annual report on the health of the nation’s fishing industry on Thursday,,, New Bedford ranked No. 1 for the value of seafood landed at its port for the 20th consecutive year in 2019, with $451 million worth of fish hauled in by its boats. That was up by $20 million compared with the year before, and far outpaced the second-ranked Port of Naknek, Alaska, which had $289 million worth of landings. NOAA officials said New Bedford’s dominance remains driven by sea scallops, which account for 84% of the value of all landings there. >click to read< 14:21
Coronavirus: Pop-up seafood market at Jersey Shore helps fishermen hurt by restaurant closures
A pop-up wholesale seafood market is helping to keep the fishing industry afloat in an Ocean County municipality. Point Pleasant Beach’s Shore Fresh Seafood Market is collaborating with the Fishermen’s Dock Cooperative to sell the catch — brought ashore on the docks directly behind the business — on its outdoor patio on Channel Drive.,, The next wholesale market is set for this Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. Offerings include sea bass, fluke, porgies, monk fish and sea scallops. more info, >click to read< 13:49
Squeezed Scallops Land High Prices
With her shrimp-colored outriggers and a home port of Seaford, Va., it wasn’t hard to wonder what a boat like Carolina Queen III was doing so far up north when she ran aground in a storm near Rockaway Inlet on Long Island last week. Turns out she was chasing the nation’s most lucrative fishery: sea scallops, which, in 2014, amounted to a $400 million market. “It’s a pretty mobile fleet,” said Deirdre Boelke, the sea scallop fishery analyst for the New England Fishery Management Council, explaining that the fishery spans an area from North Carolina to Maine, and that scallops prefer a depth of about 50 meters, or 150 feet. Read the rest here 07:43
NOAA issues climate warning for scallops
The NOAA study, formally known as the Northeast Climate Vulnerability Assessment, said Atlantic sea scallops have “limited mobility and high sensitivity to the ocean acidification that will be more pronounced as water temperatures warm.” “The biomass has been increasing over the last 10 years, and there is no sign of it depleting because of the warmer waters,” Richard Canasta said. “They’re talking a few degrees, and that’s not going to make much of a difference in terms of scallop population.” Read the rest here 07:21
Securing the supply of sea scallops for today and tomorrow
Good management has brought the $559 million United States sea scallop fishery back from the brink of collapse over the past 20 years. However, its current fishery management plan does not account for longer-term environmental change like ocean warming and acidification that may affect the fishery in the future. A group of researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), National Marine Fisheries Service, and Ocean Conservancy? hope to change that. Read the rest here 17:18
Sea scallops close to ‘sustainable’ MSC label ? Big ENGO deal. NOT!
NEW BEDFORD — An international environmental group is a step away from declaring the Atlantic scallop fishery as “sustainable,” properly managed and in no immediate danger of overfishing..Seafood consultant Jim Kendall, a former scalloper, said he had mixed feelings about the ruling and the association with the council. He noted that the council is an environmental group that collects fees to obtain its seal. Kendall said it is questionable to pay often adversarial environmental groups for their approval, when “government regulations in the U.S. are the official seal of sustainability”. more@southcoasttoday 08:35
