Enhancement of the Scallop Fishery
Project lead: Farrell Davis
Funded by: NOAA Sea Scallop Research Set-Aside and private donations
The encompassing goal of this multi-year project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a seeding program to enhance and stabilize scallop recruitment on Georges Bank while documenting the factors that affect seed survival, with a longer-term goal of developing scallop seeding as an active management strategy to mitigate unpredictable recruitment. This strategy would offer a viable mitigation strategy for use to combat impacts on recruitment from offshore wind development and climate change or thin beds to increase growth and survival following extremely high recruitment events. Previous efforts examined scallop dispersal and predation events after transplanting small batches of scallops using multi-day deployments of our stationary camera stands. Current efforts are focused on developing efficient methods for moving scallops and tracking scallop fates after transplant using tags and optical surveys.