Wild Scallop Stock Enhancement Project
Marsden Brewer, Coordinator
A Fishing Community Based Project

June 2003 update:

I've got to start by saying thanks to Dana Morse, Sea Grant ME and Scott Feindel, ME DMR for doing the updates on their work over the last winter. It was good to have some time to get traps repaired and buoys painted. Unfortunately even with getting a break from filling up space in my good friend Bill Crowe's newspaper there has been a lot going on with the scallop project over the winter.

With all the work everyone has put in trying to put a few million scallops back on bottom it didn't make sense to harvest them before they were old enough to reproduce. To remedy this I got an old friend of mine who happened to be a state legislator, the reason that I say "old friend" is because he has known me since I first came home from the hospital in diapers, to sponsor a bill that would increase the minimum size of the scallop shell to 4 inch over the next two years. With the help of some of this projects strongest supporters and the collective wisdom of our states Joint Standing Legislative Committee of Marine Resources the bill passed and the resource won, even though the political arm of the DMR could only seem to be able to speak neither for nor against the biological and economic benefits of the increase.

This year with the help of Craig Pendleton and Rosanne Mizzoni at the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance we will be sending about half of the scallops that we caught down Saco way to be used for wild stock enhancement, research and education.

The middle of May the project got some help with data collection from Theresa Torrent-Ellis of the Maine Coastal Program and her students in the Penobscot Bay Stewards Program. They spent the afternoon out on the boat with Dana and me and helped start getting bag counts for this years settlement data layer. In order to get credible counts we always make sure that fishermen don't do the counts. It is not that fishermen can't count; it is just that when they do it is always industry generated data whose credibility is always suspect. While there is still more samples to look at, initial counts looked to be in the 1500 to 2500 range per bag.

Pen Bay Stewards counting subsets of volume metric counts.

One thing that is becoming obvious is that wild stock enhancement alone isn't going to give us a sustainable fishery. If we are going to be successful culture is probably going to be part of it. Over the last three years I've spent a lot of time trying to find a way to grow some of these scallops without leasing. I went to Augusta three years ago to help convince the Joint Standing Legislative Committee on Marine Resources to pass a bill that would allow small scale culture by licensing the gear used, like we do with lobster trap tags. The bill passed and the Gov signed it but so far the DMR has prohibited scallops from being grown this way and has successfully made that way of growing so burdensome that even if they did allow scallops to be grown this way it wouldn't be worth the aggravation. Some of us in the project have gotten to the point where even though leasing leaves us with a knot in our stomach we realize that it is more important to get the challenges associated with scallop culture worked out than to wait till we get the problems with leasing addressed.

What has happened recently is that five of the core fishermen involved in the project have decided to form a LLC and apply for four or five .99 acre spots to begin to grow scallops in cages that sit on legs about six to eight inches of bottom. We plan to use rotational management of the sites and allow a different site to lay fallow from our culture activities each year. We are looking at a stocking density low enough so that it can coexist with the lobster fishery, about 20 cages per acre. The area if interest is in the upper Penobscot bay, it was selected because it is an area that has a lower density of lobster gear than many areas around here and it is an area that has a history of growing a good scallop but only seems to get a good set about once every twenty years.

There will be many challenges to be worked through and this idea has spawned some unusual collaborations. We are hopeful that the outcome is worth the aggravation. I'll keep you posted on our progress.

-Marsden Brewer