Attendance Leo Byrnes, David Bouchard, Sandy Campbell, Rob Garrison, Harlyn Halvorson, Dvora Hart, Dale Leavett, Diane C. Murphy, Albert "Skip" Norgest, Jack Pearce, John A. Quinlan, Paul Rago, Ron Smolowitz, Scott Soares, Richard Taylor, Rick York

Greetings - Dr. Harlyn Halvorson welcomed the group, thanked the Mass Maritime Academy for hosting the meeting, and thanked Dr. Kim Harrison of NRAC for supporting the publication of Sea Scallop Aquaculture: 1999 Blueprint". This was published by the Northeastern Regional Aquaculture Center. Publication No. NRAC 99-001. Copies have been sent to members of the SSWG, the NRAC mailing list, and to the Ways and Means, Science and Technology and Natural Resources Committees of the Mass. Senate and House. Members were urged to support recommendations in the blueprint relevant to their committees. Additional copies of the Blueprint are available on request.

Update on SEMAC activities - Diane Murphy reported that SEMAC has just announced their RFP for their industry-driven R & D minigrant program. SEMAC is working with industry on Better Management Practices (BMP) through a series of ongoing public meetings. These well attended meetings aim at identifying issues and formulating plans to address these issues. These BMP's are for nearshore/onshore shellfish. The bay scallop restoration project has two phases: (1) SEMAC and Cape Cod Cooperative extension initiated Bay Scallop experiments in the fall of 1999 to investigate the success of overwintering juvenile scallops at sites throughout Cape cod. Approximately 302,000 juvenile bay scallops were deployed in 9 towns (Barnstable, Bourne, Chatham, Dennis, Eastham, Falmouth, Maspee, Orleans and Yarmouth). The objective was to access each town: i.e. shellfish constables in the handling of the skills as a precursor to the restoration effort in the spring. (2). The surviving supply of bay scallops in the spring 2000 will be redistributed into spawning sanctuaries and held until spawning occurs.

GLOBEC Overview and products related to commercial fisheries - Scott Gallager (WHOI) described the US GLOBEC Georges Bank project as a relatively large program with more than 60 investigators from 20 institutions. It was designed to address the question: How will changes in the global environment affect the abundance and distribution of animals in the sea, particularly those that are commercially important such as cod and haddock stocks on Georges Bank? To accomplish this we are modeling potential environmental changes mechanistically- piece by piece, to predict the response of the ecosystem to climate change. GLOBEC PI's have conducted experimental work and made observations on a spectrum of spatial scales from global scales to the scale of the microscopic world around individual plankton as input into trophodynamic and physical models. The need to make these measurements has driven the development of state of the art technologies, which are used to rapidly and quantitatively assess the distribution and behavior of life in the sea. The numerical models developed in this program build the environment from the bottom up allowing a long list of "what if" scenarios to be efficiently tested. Why did we choose Georges Bank?

1. It has a shape similar to many other banks around the world rising up from thousands of meters to a shallow depth of just 60 m at the center.

2. It has a recirculating physical circulation pattern, which allows distinct populations to develop and persist over many years.

3. Because of this, it is a highly productive area of major economic importance because of its fish and shellfish stocks.

4. It lies in a boundary region between subtropical-tropical and temperate, with subarctic to the north. This means that even minor shifts in the boundary location as would occur during climate change will cause major changes in the communities of organisms that live there.

5. We also needed a site, which had an extensive historical database as a backdrop to our short-term study of high frequency variability in the environment.

He went on to point out that since the planktonic stages of marine fish are most susceptible to mortality, we chose as our target species the larval stages of cod and haddock and the principle prey that they feed on, copepods, the most abundant animals or zooplankton in the ocean. Other prey that we have since come to learn as being critical to the survival of cod and haddock larvae include extremely small plants or phytoplankton and zooplankton. The predators of cod and haddock larvae are also being studied and include fish like mackerelring and a variety of invertebrate predators. Why is the physical circulation pattern on Georges Bank so important to understanding growth and recruitment of cod and haddock? The clockwise gyre circulation around the bank carries newly spawned eggs and hatched larvae full circle around the bank within about 50 days. Those larvae that have survived the gauntlet of predators and have found sufficient food are ready to metamorphose into the juvenile form in the central region of the bank. However, there are many sources of mortality due to both large scale or bank wide effects and local effects on the microscopic level of the individual fish larva. It is these processes which have become the focus of the GLOBEC program. How is this process being studied? Large scale processes are being studied through monthly sampling sites distributed around the bank, long term moorings position at key locations, and remote sensing such as satellites. Small-scale processes are being studied through experimentation and observations where specific hypotheses concerning the coupling between the biology and the physics are tested.

What have we learned? There are large scale, regional processes and local, micro-scale processes forcing the dynamics of plankton populations on Georges Bank. On a large, regional scale, we now know that periodic intrusions of very cold but relatively fresh water can cross over from the Scotian Shelf displacing resident populations of plankton, including fish larvae, replacing them with unique plankton communities. Another large scale feature which impacts Georges Bank populations are warm core rings spawned from the Gulf Stream current to the south and can move far up onto the bank again displacing resident populations of plankton and fish larvae. Periodic wind event or storms particularly from the north, northeast can move surface water containing fish larvae completely off the bank resulting in complete loss of the larval population. It is the magnitude and frequency of such large-scale events, which contributes to the inter-annual variability in recruitment of fish larvae. On a more local scale of the individual fish larva, hydroids, a kind of jelly fish, have been found to be a potentially severe predator on fish larvae and their prey when they are suspended in the plankton. These hydroids normally live on the bottom but may be torn off and resuspended by the action of storms, or possibly even by the trawl gear used by fisherman. More information on how this might impact larval populations is needed. An element critical to the success of GLOBEC has been the development of key instrumentation, which allow mapping the distribution of plankton along with important physical characteristics of the water. One such instrument called the Video Plankton Recorder tows what you can think of as an underwater microscope through the water snapping pictures of the plankton as it goes. Image processing software then identifies each of the images allowing real-time maps of plankton distributions to be generated as the ship steams. Another system called Biomaper uses high frequency acoustics to map the distribution of plankton in relation to physical features in the water column. Together, such instruments have given us an unprecedented view of the coupling between plankton and their physical environment and have become the benchmark for instrumentation in biological oceanography. Perhaps the most important product of the GLOBEC program will be the development of numerical models which combine growth and behavior of larval fish with the physical environment to allow predictions of when and where recruitment will be strongest.

Models of copepod overwintering in the deep basins of the Gulf of Maine show that Georges Bank does not have a resident population of these prey and must be reseeded annually from sources off the bank. Scott Gallager noted as an applied spin off from the GLOBEC study, physical flow field models and models based on larval behavior of Sea Scallops (e.g., Gallager et al. 1996. Mar Biol 124:679-692) have been coupled to simulate the release and settlement of sea scallops from various closed areas around the bank. Resource managers at NOAA are using this model right now to ask questions about when to close and reopen sites on the bank. This is a very exciting step for our work to take science and apply it to existing fisheries problems. Just like meteorological models, oceanographic models can not operate in a vacuum and need periodic update and verification from data taken in situ. We need long term monitoring of key environmental variables on Georges Bank and other productive commercial fishing grounds. A number of programs are beginning to emerge which combine scientific data gathering with the commercial fishing fleet to allow data acquisition on a very cost effective basis. One such study funded by the NOPP program (Peter Wiebe and Ann Bucklin, PI s), is an attempt to integrate scientific instrumentation with the commercial fishing fleet to measure a suite of hydrographic variables and transmit data directly to shore via satellite where they would be assimilated directly into numerical models. A Request for Proposals for another program called "The Northeast Consortium" will be announced January promises to provide funding to projects with goals similar to the NOPP program discussed above.

Richard Taylor noted that the key item in the dramatic increase in production of the Japanese scallop over the last 30 years has been the development of methods to obtain a reliable source of seed animals by the placement of artificial substrate in the water column. Here the key issues are timing and placement, the when and where to put out collectors in order to maximize settlement. Examination of information from many existing efforts gives us a significant start on the issue of where we might place scallop spat collectors in this region:

1). data from many years of the NEFSC Albatross IV scallop survey includes the positions the survey has repeatedly located new sets of small scallop over time.

(2). the current simulation models developed by the Dartmouth Numerical Methods Laboratory for the GLOBEC program demonstrate the effect of the George's Bank gyre in funneling drifting particles into specific high density areas. This modeling is particularly useful to our understanding source/sink relationships, that is, where the larvae from a specific area might be carried.

(3). John Quinlan (UNC, WHOI) described a parallel drifter simulation model developed for the MidAtlantic region the limit of the southern range of our scallop. Efforts are underway to link the two models, especially important since the GoM/GB model tends to show particles from the Nantucket Lightship Closed Area are carried to the west beyond the model boundary.

(4). ongoing GLOBEC investigations particularly along the Northern Edge and the Southern Flank serve to reveal fine scale structure and movement over time.

(5). Paul Rago (NEFSC) described potential use of the Boatracs vessel position data which has a broader spatial extant than the NEFSC survey data and significantly greater accuracy than vessel trip reports. This may prove useful to reveal other areas of repeated settlement, thus offer local opportunities for spat collection.

(6). Sea Surface Temperature and Ocean Color sensors aboard an increasing collection of orbital platforms give access to the spatial position (within 1 km) of fronts thus could reduce search radius and time at sea. Graphics of processed AVHRR images from a Tim Mavor (NOAA/NESDIS) www site were presented. The images mapped the spatial position of temperature fronts over time. Overlays of NEFSC scallop data exhibited strong correlation in the Great South Channel area.

After Scott Gallager gave his presentation Jack Pearce gave him "kudos", suggesting that he had moved an order of magnitude ahead from Bob Parker's efforts in sensing the benthos using a" blackbox" video, and had made a quantum leap from Ro Glover's undulating plankton recorder, which was developed in Edinburgh and used from "ships of opportunity" as they traversed the North Atlantic. Gallager's video will allow us to "conduct the taxonomy as the basic surveys are made as to sources of eggs and larvae responsible for recruitment to George's Bank and other ecosystems"! Jack Pearce continued, Ken Sherman and colleagues, David Mountain, can make great leaps forward in their studies of larval recruitment using data garnered via Gallager's video system, and at far less cost than the traditional ways used. Moreover, the resulting visuals will be far more convincing to the FMCs, fishers, and industry. Perhaps more important in these days of concern about global climate change and decline in biodiversity, the microvideo monitoring can demonstrate impacts to habitat quality and H' never before possible!

As the presentations shifted to "closed areas" and "reservations", Jack Pearce noted that the areas closed might have interest to those far away, i.e. fishers and managers in the Carolinas might not want a closed area opened if, indeed, eggs and larvae from a closed area might be seeding a scallop bed off North Carolina. "The opening and closing of the so-called reservations may well have to involve an inter-FMC activity, and the microvideo could become prime documentary materials for management (real hitech steps forward here)." After Richard Taylor spoke about using the commercial vessels for "research", Jack Pearce mentioned that one would have to be careful to note that the scientists involved, and fishers, must keep in mind that previous assessment cruises "used highly sophisticated ways to statistically for random collections in assessment endeavors", and even if the fishing vessels were used for "nonassessment activities" they should operate to be consistent with fisheries assessment "needs".

New England Fishery Management Council update on scallop related items. Ron Smolowitz pointed out that the scallop industry and the New England Fishery Management Council are working towards a new Amendment to the sea scallop Fishery Management Plan that will depend primarily on a rotational fishing strategy. This movement started in June of 1997 when the F/V Westport, working on the Seastead project, made several short scallop seed collection tows in one of the grounfish closed areas. In 38 minutes of bottom time the vessel caught 700 bushels of market size scallops that were transplanted to the Seastead site. Word of this catch encouraged the scallop industry to work with CMAST to survey groundfish closed area II. This survey in the spring of 1998 found huge concentrations of large scallops proving the value of leaving areas unfished. The industry formed the Fisheries Survival Fund and began a campaign to harvest from the closed areas and to develop rotational fishing. He further noted that framework 11 allowed access to closed area II this summer and was a tremendous success from all perspectives. Frameworks 12 and 13 are going through the development process and will allow limited access to all three groundfish areas in 2000 if approved. Amendment 10 is now undergoing a process called scoping where the public will be asked to comment at a series of public meetings in February on what should be included.

The scallop industry has accepted the concepts of resource enhancement and predator controls as worthy for research under this Amendment. One percent of the scallop TAC (190,000 lbs.) has been set aside to fund research. Jack Pearce noted that the problem of the environmentalist's view of habitats, in fact, a real problem; the environmentalist may in fact have a much stronger view than the fisher or industry personnel, in fact even stronger than his/her own colleagues in the agency. We must develop a scientific definition of "damage", and how trawl or dumping, or discharge actually squares with other "natural" damage, such as storm effects or freshwater intrusions. Richard Taylor pointed out that the continued presence of Ron Smolowitz in Fishermen's Survival Fund (FSF) efforts has driven many of the forward looking aspects within the New England Fishery Management Council, specifically the 1% TAC research setaside, areas to be used for growout and scallop related research. FSF has organized and led the scallop industry presence in scallop related meetings at the Plan Development Team and Scallop Committee level. From there recommendations are passed from Committee to the full Council.

Additionally many of the initial submissions (6 of 12) to the Research Steering Committee for regionwide funding under the1% setaside were from regular SSWG participants (Smolowitz, Goudey, Taylor). Plan Development Team meetings are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, 25 and 26 Jan, at the Center for Marine Science and Technology, UMASS Dartmouth, in New Bedford. The major item for discussion is Amendment 10, originally scheduled to focus on developing an area management strategy. At this stage many other items have been added to the list to be included in the scoping and public hearing process. Andy Applegate, Council staff, has offered time for presentation to all interested parties. The criteria for opening and closing areas are seen as key concepts needing work. Presentations and comments are expected from CMAST staff (Stokesbury, Cai), FSF (Smolowitz, Kenchington), and NEFSC (Rago, Hart). Goudey and Taylor will present a more detailed description and analysis of the scallop survey data, effect of persistent frontal systems, and their possible application to area management of scallop.

Scoping hearings for Amendment 10 will be held in Fairhaven, Mass on Feb15, Cape May, NJ on Feb16, and Norfolk, VA on Feb17. The dates for further public hearings will be announced later.

Boston Public Market - Statewide Producers Cooperative Market - Sandy Campbell described the history of involvement in public markets and identified this an opportunity to provide private funds to support aquaculture in Massachusetts. He reviewed the public markets in Europe, Canada and the Pike's Market in Seattle. Since early times Boston, and New England, has a long history in promoting local agricultural and seafood products. With the redesign of the Farnell market in Boston, the opportunity to promote local products was lost. For several years the Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture has explored the feasibility of creating a public market in Boston. As reported in earlier SSWG meetings, the USDA Agriculture Marketing Services and the State of Mass. have funded this initiative. The Friends of the Boston Public Market have been working for the past year and a half to bring together a concept for a Boston Public Market: To provide an indoor pubic market for the residents of the inner City of Boston, providing fresh produce, seafood, specialty products and crafts of the highest quality and at a reasonable price from the commonwealth of Massachusetts and the New England region. Mr. Campbell, who has been retained as a consultant, provided a concept plan (see attachment) to develop a 40,000 square ft. combined indoor, outdoor market to provide a wide range of Massachusetts food, farm and seafood products. He described three options to develop this market by a non-profit corporation and/or a public-private partnership with representation by the State, City of Boston, Federation of Farmers Markets and the developer/landowner. The most feasible economical plan would incorporate two restaurants, a specialty food store, and a produce cooperative. Sandy Campbell described the benefits of such a market: a) high volume, b) guaranteed market prices, c) partnership, and d) long term market stability. A Boston Public Market Symposium is being planned in the early spring of this year to further explore this concept.

Sea Scallop Blueprint Distribution - Harlyn Halvorson described the distribution of the Blueprint. Members are urged to submit names and addressees to whom the report should be sent.

Next Meeting 9:30 AM, March 28th, at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

Harlyn O. Halvorson

January 25, 2000