Bay scallops brought prosperity and community to the people of Shelter Island. Today, most of the scallops are gone, but some fishermen haven’t given up hope.
“I didn’t come out here with big plans to get rich today,” he said. “You can’t say it’s depressing, because you already know. But you hope.”
He bashed north against the waves, toward the protected bay off Orient, at the far northeast corner of Long Island. He dropped four rusty dredges into the water, just as the bay turned pink with sunrise. He let the outboard rumble the boat around for five minutes. Then he pulled the dredges back up and dumped the contents into a sorting tray.
“Let’s see, we got seaweed, rocks, conch shells, lots of dead scallops and one good scallop,” he said, picking through the dreck with bright orange gloves. “So we’re averaging half a scallop per dredge. That’s not going to pay the bills.”
Well, sure as shit, if you can only find one living scallop in the water, the best thing to do is haul it out and kill it before it can survive and make any more.
Surprisingly it sounds like something other than overfishing.
at the moment, most of the adult scallops in Peconic Bay are dead. They died in 2019, and nobody knew exactly why. They died again the following year — about 98 percent of all the adult scallops, dead in their pink and green and gray shells along the bottom of the bay — and most of them died every year after.
He is apparently more resourceful than the intro suggests…
Mr. Tehan works three jobs, one as a captain on the North Ferry to Shelter Island, another as a building contractor and a third helping his wife run Flowers’ Edge, a florist in Cutchogue.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to talk trash on Mr. Dude who’s just trying to feed his family. I was just saying the whole problem maybe needs a rethink beyond, let’s just let everyone keep dredging this puppy and send a scientist out in a boat once in a while to take a look, and hope things get better soon.
Well, sure as shit, if you can only find one living scallop in the water, the best thing to do is haul it out and kill it before it can survive and make any more.
“We’re all just trying to find the guy who did this!”
Surprisingly it sounds like something other than overfishing.
Maybe it’s another dead zone from runoff?
Could be a bunch of things… pollution, parasites, disease, water temperature (the latter 3, like attributable to climate change).
He is apparently more resourceful than the intro suggests…
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to talk trash on Mr. Dude who’s just trying to feed his family. I was just saying the whole problem maybe needs a rethink beyond, let’s just let everyone keep dredging this puppy and send a scientist out in a boat once in a while to take a look, and hope things get better soon.