COMMERCE
Subscriber Services
Classified Ads
Subscribe
Advertise
NEWS
This Month
Editorial
Letters
F/V Safety
Past Issues
ABOUT US
Contact Us
Latest Issue
Subscribe
History
MORE CONTENT
CFN Archives
Links
Each month exclusively in the PRINT edition of CFN
Along the Coast
Ask the Lobster Doc
Bearin’s
Classifieds
Coming Events
Editorial
Enforcement Report
FISH SAFE
Fleet Additions
Letters
Lobster Market Report
New Boats
News Catch
Quahog Market Report
|
Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 6
February 2006
SMAST, industry tag thousands of scallops
Tag returns needed for growth studies
NEW BEDFORD, MA – In a remarkable show of organization and teamwork, the scalloper Liberty and her crew carried out a mission last May that resulted in the tagging of roughly 28,100 scallops.
The vessel carried 17 people – fishermen, family members, and SMAST graduate students and technicians. After six days of round-the-clock work on two watches, the team successfully tagged 15,500 scallops in the Elephant Trunk area and 12,600 scallops around the Tower.
“We had a lot of fun with it,” said Liberty Capt. Danny Eilertsen, whose son, brother, and nephew went on the trip.
The operation, by several accounts, went like clockwork. After obtaining video footage of a section of bottom, the Liberty would dredge up scallops for tagging. Then the same patch of bottom would be videoed a second time.
“This gave us a sense of the impact of the gear on the bottom,” said Brad Harris, who has taken the lead on the tagging and habitat work as SMAST’s marine fisheries field research group project manager.
Eilertsen himself was able to view the video images on a screen right from the wheelhouse.
“I was fascinated to see what happens on the bottom, what happens to the habitat when we pass a dredge over it,” he said.
The Liberty served as the platform for SMAST’s 2002 tagging expedition when the crew tagged 18,274 scallops in the Great South Channel. In 2001, four vessels, including the Liberty, tagged a total of 11,704 scallops in a different part of the channel.
Everyone learned a lot from those earlier experiences, and the 2005 operation was the smoothest yet.
Eilertsen said, “We’ve streamlined it quite a bit.”
Need tags back
With over 58,000 SMAST-tagged scallops in the water, the message now is: “If you find a tag, please return it.”
“Tagging is a lot of work, but it’s virtually meaningless unless you get the scallops back,” said Harris.
A toll free number is printed on each tag, and SMAST makes sure every scalloper who returns a tag knows how much it’s appreciated. The staff personally picks up tags, hands out baseball caps, and gives fishermen brochures explaining why every tag matters.
“We find that once one tag has been returned, that vessel will continue to return tags,” said Harris.
Roughly 10% of the scallops tagged in 2001 and 2002 have been returned.
So far, the scallops tagged in 2005 in the Elephant Trunk area have been off limits. The area is closed to commercial harvesting, which is exactly why SMAST wanted to tag there.
“We wanted to let those tagged scallops sit there for a year or two,” said Harris. “Plus, there was an incredibly high set of seed there.”
The Liberty has already committed to conducting the 2006 tagging cruise on which SMAST hopes to tag another 30,000 scallops, though the final tagging spots haven’t been picked yet.
“We’ll have a really thorough discussion with our fishermen’s group before we settle on a location,” said Harris.
Tagging purpose
According to Harris, the tagging work was initiated to get a better handle on scallop growth rates.
Although fishermen and researchers intuitively know that scallops grow at different rates in different areas – say, inside the Georges Bank closed areas vs. the open areas – the phenomenon needs to be documented.
The way it works now, scientists take the number of scallops in a given year in a given area and apply a growth rate, which allows them to project what will be on the bottom – and available for harvest – a year or two down the road.
“Under the current management strategy, allocations and trip limits critically depend on expectations of how much biomass will be there,” said Paul Rago of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole.
“Improved growth estimates can be used to provide more refined estimates of what we expect of the available resource at the time of these openings,” he said.
Also, better growth estimates will be important to the science center as it moves toward a more analytical stock assessment approach for scallops.
“There’s a concerted effort by a number of groups, including us here at the center, to refine the growth estimates,” Rago said.
Janice M. Plante
Back to story list
|
|
Tell us what you think.
