Here it is....
Researchers monitoring bay scallops in the Peconic Estuary say that there are clear signs this summer of another massive die-off of the valuable shellfish unfolding on local bay bottoms for the fourth year in a row.
Biologists from the Cornell Cooperative Extension Marine Program say that they have seen almost 100 percent mortality of adult bay scallops in just the last month at two monitoring sites in Northwest Harbor in East Hampton and in Orient Harbor on the North Fork.
That fits the pattern seen in the previous three summers: Large numbers of seemingly healthy and abundant scallops suddenly die en masse midsummer.
“Up until a month ago, we were seeing a scallop about every meter, which is a pretty good number of adults,” said Harrison Tobi, who oversees the scallop monitoring for the Bay Scallop Restoration Project at CCE. “But three weeks ago, they were almost 100 percent gone at Orient Harbor and Northwest Harbor. From a scallop every meter, it went to a total of two scallops — we only found two scallops.”
After Labor Day, the scientists will expand their surveying to 20 additional sites between Flanders and Orient, comparing the numbers they find to what was seen in the spring. There is little hope that the results will be remarkably different than what the narrow summer surveys showed, Tobi said.
The summer die-off appears to have again coincided with the adult scallops’ spawning cycle, which typically takes place in late June and July. Samplings have also shown that nearly 100 percent of the scallops in the bays are now infested with an only recently discovered parasite that appears to weaken the scallops.
Scientists believe that the weakening effects of the parasite, record-high water temperatures in the bays caused by climate change and the stresses of spawning are causing the now annual wide-scale die-offs.
As has been the case in the previous three years, the lone bright spot amid the devastation seems to be that the previously abundant adults did successfully spawn again before they died — hopefully, seeding a new generation that might break the pattern.
The spawning success, even as prodigious as it has been in recent years, does nothing to help those who once counted on harvesting bay scallops from local estuaries each fall for income.
For most of the 20th century, the Peconic bay scallop harvest was the most lucrative jewel of a shellfish harvesting industry that sustained hundreds of commercial fishing families. But starting in 1985, the emergence of algae blooms like the infamous “brown tide” all but wiped out the bay scallops from across Long Island’s estuaries.
After decades of reseeding efforts and a fits-and-starts recovery, the shellfish had started to show signs of rebounding to abundance. The 2019 harvest was expected to be one of the largest in decades, based on the preliminary surveys from Cornell.
But the first massive die-off was discovered that fall.
Scallop harvest season opens the first Monday in November, a date set long ago to allow the scallops to spawn a second time in early fall before they were harvested. In the last three years, the season’s opening has amounted to essentially nothing from most of the waterways that give the Peconic bay scallops their name.
“They are surviving as a species for now, but not as a harvestable product,” Tobi said. “They are reproducing — they’re just dying before we can harvest them. But they are existing. So that’s one bright spot, I suppose.”
Some of the adults are surviving — scant few numbers in relation to millions that litter the bottom of the Peconic Estuary before the die-offs, but some — and the scientists are trying to tap the genetics of those resilient few to help the species weather the withering effects of changing ecological stresses.
Stony Brook University scientists have begun a selective breeding program, using scallops that have survived the die-offs, in the hope that they have some genetic variation that helped them survive the onslaught of stressors that may be inherited by their offspring, giving them a better chance at survival, too.
“Harrison and I went out in April and collected a bunch of the 2-year-old scallops, which are rare and hard to find, but we managed to get about 45 or 50 of them,” said Dr. Stephen Tettlebach, who led the scallop research efforts for Long Island University and then Cornell Cooperative before handing it over to Tobi this year. “The idea being that these are animals that survived through a full season of high temps and disease, so if there’s any genetic element that helped them survive, they might pass that on to their progeny.
“We’re hoping those scallops survived because of genetics, not just chance,” Tobi added, noting that resistance to the deleterious effects of the parasite infection is an obvious adaptation that the evolutionary process would likely find its way to, though perhaps only over many decades. “We’re hoping we can help at least speed up that process.”
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