By Peter Brace
(Nantucket Independent).- Town Shellfish Biologist Jeff Mercer is looking for a safe place in Nantucket Harbor to put two million juvenile bay scallops he is getting for free from the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration to help enhance the natural population.

The young scallops, known as seed, were spawned in NOAA's shellfish research lab in Milford, Conn. using around 100 adult bay scallops from Nantucket waters. With the scallops nearing one to two millimeters in size toward the end of this week, Mercer traveled off island on Monday to pick up Nantucket Harbor's newest residents to be grown out first in floating cages called upwellers, later in submerged net bags and then released into the harbor.

The impetus for this human-assisted procreation of bay scallops is two dismal commercial scalloping seasons prior to last season's fairly decent haul of 16,800 bushels and a slow, grudging acceptance of the reality that something, in addition to choking off harbor pollution, improving circulation and curtailing the harvesting of seed, needs to be done to restore wild populations of Nantucket's most delicious mollusk. Mercer, 2 6, would love to put the two million seed in the waters of Second Bend between Second and Third points on the inside of Coatue, but he cannot.

"We've agreed with the scallopers that we will open Second Bend to fishing this year and I've been out there quite a bit and I'm very happy with what's in there; lots of scallops of all different age classes and the eel grass looks very healthy," said Mercer. "We've talked about Fourth Bend or Fifth Bend.

In 2 007, the town paid $6,500 to the Aquaculture Research Corporation of Dennis, Mass. to spawn one million seed from wild adult Nantucket bay scallops. Those scallops were then grown out in upwellers and net bags and released into Second Bend when they reached around 2 5mm. The town's Marine & Coastal Resources Department and the Shellfish & Harbor Advisory Board agreed to close Second Bend to all methods of commercial and recreational scallop harvesting for the 2007/2008 season with the provision that it be re-opened for fishing this coming season.

By then, the hatchery-raised scallops would have reached sexual maturity, spawning once in early summer when the water temperature reaches 68 degrees Fahrenheit - a biological trigger - and again in the fall when it descends to that temperature, achieving scallopers' and the town's goal of substantially increasing scallop spawning in Nantucket Harbor. With the two spawning events past, the scallops are then fair game. And Mercer said that the scallop Class of 2 008's success rate looks fairly promising from what he is already seeing in the harbor.

"It's really tough to tell until the end of the summer, [but] we are finding quite a few of them," he said. "We're able to distinguish the hatchery scallops from the wild population just from the number of shock rings on the hatchery scallops. It's looking pretty good, we're seeing plenty of those hatchery scallops in Second Bend and we're also seeing plenty of natural seed in Second Bend, which is good."

The second batch of store-bought scallop progeny is costing the town nothing, as NOAA, more than happy to both help the East Coast's last sustainable bay scallop fishery stay afloat and study it at the same time, is already in the business of producing shellfish for research at its Milford lab, said Mercer.

With Second Bend off the seed sanctuary list for at least the coming season, Mercer is going to have to get creative for these baby scallops and that could prove challenging with Fourth and Fifth bends clogged with a seaweed called codium. For now though, the seed scallops will continue growing in the floating upwellers moored off the pier in front of the town's marine lab in the Brant Point boathouse. As they grow rapidly in the upwellers, quickly crowding each other for food and oxygen in the water, Mercer will move them into strings of one-square-foot, pyramid-shaped pearl nets anchored in the harbor and strings of lantern nets to be grown for release into the wild in late October into early November.

That Mercer, with a master's of science in biological oceanography from the University of Connecticut, is doing this work for Nantucket at all is strong testament to the collective will of the bay scallop industry on Nantucket and the town in their conservation efforts for this endangered fishery.

"It's going pretty good out here," he said. "Nantucket scallop fishermen realize the issues that face scallops, and the water quality issues and eel grass issues that face the scallops seems to be commonplace.

"The one thing that needs to be addressed more is the taking of seed scallops. If all the fishermen [didn't take] seed scallops, the population would be more sustainable."

Source: http://www.nantucketindependent.com