Town to buy off-island scallop seed to aid fishery
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER

Faced with another record-low scallop harvest this season, Town Biologist Keith Conant is moving ahead with a plan to buy scallop seed from a hatchery off island to help save the fishery.

With the backing of the Shellfish & Harbor Advisory Board, Conant will gather about 40 healthy adult scallops from Nantucket waters and send them to Aquaculture Research Corporation of Dennis, Mass., where spawning will be induced to create 1 million seed at one to three millimeters in size. The seed will be grown out to the size of a quarter in floating cages and released back on Nantucket into what Conant hopes will be seed sanctuaries.

The Marine & Coastal Resources Department and SHAB would rather not buy seed produced off island because of the potential for contamination of Nantucket shellfish with diseases, including rickettsia, chlamydia and perkinsus.

But with a harvest of 5,500 bushels last season, and around 3,800 dredged so far this season, the palpable fear of a fishery in danger of collapse is forcing the town's hands in augmenting natural populations with aquaculture grown seed.

"We're trying to maintain the biomass so it doesn't fall through a threshold of reproductive capability," said Conant. "We're looking into it because we may already be at [that] threshold level and potentially the only option we may have is to purchase seed from a hatchery. This really wasn't a scenario we wanted to go with."

And it may not even work. Past scallop seeding efforts yielded little or no tangible results. Unlike quahogs, oysters and soft-shell clams, scallops are more fickle, move around a lot and are tough to track.

"The last time we did, we put 300,000, 50-millimeter scallops in Second Bend and when we went back there we found nothing," said Marine Superintendent Dave Fronzuto. "If it's too much current, not enough food, not enough grass, too much grass; they move," said Fronzuto.

In his update on the seeding plan, Conant told SHAB at its Feb. 20 meeting that seed production costs $6,500 to make 1 million. That cost is likely to be covered by a grant from DMF, according to Fronzuto.

"We feel that it may be the only viable option other than shutting down the fishery for a number of years, so the biomass is able to sustain itself," said Conant. "The way it looks now, the biomass is not at a level it can sustain itself."