The Long Island University professor, who is slated to give the lecture “The Long Road Back: Restoration of Peconic Bay Scallops” this Friday at Stony Brook-Southampton, talks about the challenges the bay scallop population has faced in recent years, the success of his team’s county-funded restoration project and his favorite way to cook the delicate local treasures.
When did you first get involved with local bay scallop biology and restoration?
It was about 1987, actually. I did my masters and PhD on bay scallops in Connecticut, so I have actually worked on bay scallops for over 30 years. When I got to New York, Southampton College ended up getting involved in restoration work pretty soon after it started.
What was your initial work like? What was your focus?
The initial work was a project I did with some students from Southampton College and Chris Smith from the Cornell Cooperative Extension. We worked on a project where we looked at the mortality of scallops in the winter due to burial by mud and sand that is moved around. It was something I had seen in Connecticut and I wanted to get an idea if it was something potentially important in causing the mortality of planted scallops in New York and what we found was it was a very important key to the restoration plan going forward.
What was the remedy?
Basically we choose areas for planting scallops that are less susceptible to burial. Scallops in the winter are totally out of it, they cant get out of their own way. If you bury them under sand when the water temperature is low, they will not swim or recover themselves – they just die. So we chose areas where that is less of a likelihood – areas with eel grass or other kinds of vegetation or deeper waters and them seem to fair better.
Historically, what have been the biggest challenges facing shellfish populations – as whole or specific to scallops if you would like – on the East End?
The biggest challenge in recent history has been the Brown Tide and I always knock on wood when I say this, but we fortunately have not had Brown Tide since 1995, which has given us this window of opportunity to go after scallop restoration in a big way and also allow the clam and oyster populations to rebuild. We don’t know as much about clams or oysters as we do bay scallops, but they were all affected by Brown Tide. Certainly, it is the biggest challenge they have faced in the last 20, 25 years.
Over the last six years, since 1995 we haven’t had Brown Tide, so the thought was the scallops should recover on their own, but they haven’t. We have several ideas why, but our major hypothesis – Chris Smith and I – was that the number of scallops in the population and the density, how close they are together, were too low to allow for the successful fertilization of eggs when spawned. What we did to address that was plant the scallops at very high densities, which was in contrast to what we did originally. What we are after here, is after the scallops reach a point where the do reproduce there should be enough of them and they should be close enough together where we will have a much greater chance of seeing a population increase.
What are the results? Do we have statistics on the project’s success?
We have five years of data collected – two years before the first reproduction and three years after that. During the first two years, 2005 and 2006, we had the same population levels as right after the Brown Tide of 1995 – it was low. With the data we have, we can actually look at what happened before our planting compared to what afterwards. So we saw in 2005, 2006, the population was low and there were no many larvae and three years since the spawning numbers have increased dramatically. In 2009, we are seeing numbers probably between 40 and 100 percent higher. We are thrilled by the results and it suggests the restoration project has been responsible for that increase. The reason I can say that is because we did sampling in the bays where we planted and sampled in areas where we didn’t and that was where population densities were low.
What do you think, from a scientific perspective – and there has been debate on the subject – was the cause of the Brown tide?
I would just really be quoting the work of other scientists because I haven’t looked at it myself. [Stony Brook-Southampton professor] Chris Gobler would be the best person to ask that question of, but in my understanding it has something to do with the ability of the Brown Tide algae to compete with other kinds of algae. Also it may have to do with the reduction of feeding on Brown Tide by animals, which gives it a competitive advantage.
What is the future of the program?
Well, the project is funded by Suffolk County, very generously. We would never have gotten this level of funding to go after this type of project by another source, whether the federal or state government. Suffolk County really went out on a limb and funded this project and really, it is the largest in the country. So we are fortunate.
Originally, our project was for four years, but we have been lucky to get funding for a fifth year and this will be our sixth. We are seeing tremendous progress. We are still quite a ways away from the good old days before the Brown Tide arrives in the mid-80s – can I say our work is done, absolutely not. We certainly hope we will be able to continue at least until we see the population closer to where it used to be and the fishery as a whole, but we are thankful for the six years we have gotten and hope we can do more.
Favorite scallop preparation?
I have several. They are great just right out of the shell. If I am going to cook them it would be pretty simple – a little garlic, a little butter, a sprinkle of bread crumbs. You don’t want to overcook them. There are lots of recipes, but they have such a delicate flavor that you don’t want to lose with a heavy sauce or flavoring.
The School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and Stony Brook Southampton will be hosting a lecture entitled “The Long Road Back: Restoration of Peconic Bay Scallops,” presented by Dr. Stephen Tettelbach of Long Island University. The event will be held on Friday, March 5 at 7:30 p.m. in Stony Brook Southampton’s Duke Lecture Hall. A reception will follow.
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