Sea Scallop Working Group Meeting
April 25, 2002
Massachusetts Maritime Academy
Buzzards Bay, MA

Attendance: Ed Baker, Marsten Brewer, Bill Burt, Leo Byrnes, Hemant Chickarmane, Rich Goetz, Harlyn Halvorson, Roger Hanlon, Porter Hoagland, Jomathan Howland, Tomas Jamir, Alan Kuzirian, Hans Laufer, Dale Leavitt, Bill McBane, Diane Murphy, Jack Pearce, Ed Rhodes, Steven Roberts, Scott Soares, Sanjay Tiwari, and Rick York,

Welcome: Harlyn Halvorson identified the executive committee of SSWG. The committee, consisting of myself, Rick Karney, Dale Leavitt, Ronald Smolowitz, Scott Soares, and Richard Taylor, are responsible for planning these meeting. Please pass along any questions or comments to them. The MMA is to be congratulated not only for hosting these meetings but also the SEMAC whose efforts in education, research and promotion have gone a long way in developing aquaculture in this area.

Dale Leavitt reported that the aquaculture program was very active dealing with extending our bay scallop program, habitat issues, and in the early stages of developing an eel grass component. An interesting project was converting a cranberry bog into an aquaculture system. This should be operational within a month. Dianne will add to this later.

Update Mass Aquaculture Program: Scott Soares reported that their office has run into some significant budget issues. The program is about five years old arising from the White Paper on the Strategic Plan for Aquaculture. Many of these recommendations have now been implemented. Since our last SSWG meeting, the operating budget has been eliminated. However we still have strong support from the Office of Environmental Affairs. The funds from the SeaPort Bond issue have been keeping us going. As a result the initial grant program has been eliminated and we are focusing on projects in the Bond issue. Through again the Office of Environmental Affairs we have been able to fund the three Aquaculture Centers. ($95K for SEMAC, $90K for NEMAC and $80K for WMAC) and through them a modest grant program. SEMAC, through the work of Cape Cod cooperative Extensions, has been focusing on shellfish. NEMAC is trying to develop an industry in its area, and WMAC is focusing on fresh water aquaculture. Other projects involve the soft shell aquaculture projects in Ipswich, Shellfish Growers Cooperative Program in Barnstable, a longline oyster project, and a cranberry bog aquaculture program involving three different species. We are also helping Greater Bedford Vocational Tech. do a large mouth bass cultivation project with federal Funding. Some of these animals are being given to private fishing clubs for stocking. Another Federal setaside is for shellfish cultivation on Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. On the education side there are a number of publications now available. On the Ag. side Jim Fair retired and we have a new commissar of Food & Ag., Douglas Gillespie, who is very supportive of our efforts. Unfortunately the department has lost a number of employees. Finally the "03 Budget calls for eliminating 23 State Departments! Fortunately a new Environmental Bond Issue was just passed which restores the aquaculture budget.

Dale Leavitt introduced the new NRAC Director, Tom Jamir, who brings to this area extensive fisheries experience. In restating the goals of NRAC he emphasized that their activities are driven by industry with an aim towards application. Proposals must be regional. He reviewed the goals of NRAC:

(1). Make Northast Region aquaculture economically competitive,
(2). Access to business know-how,
(3). Access to investment capital,
(4). Getting aquaculture as a major player in the regional economy, and
(5). Improve the management capabilities of the operation.

From these goals they have developed a Regional Plan. In this plan they have three components:

(1). Support present aquaculture region development programs,
(2). Extension and education, and
(3). Strengthen research and development.

He briefly reviewed their present programs and the establishment of benchmarks. These latter are needed to develop a business pan in order to obtain loans. They also plan to reactivate an Aquaculture Newsletter. For this and other communications, they will utilize more advanced techniques. He the briefly reviewed the organizations, projects and educational activities that NRAC is currently supporting.

Integrating Real Time Technologies into the Commercial Fishing Fleet: Quantifying Scallop Larvae in the Water Column and Adults on the Sea Floor - Richard Taylor, acting as a spokesman for a Scallop Recruitment Group led by Scott Gallager, described progress that followed SSWG recommendations in the 1999 Blueprint. He recalled that when the Japanese lost their scallop grounds in the Kurile Islands, they looked for alternative directions. He described the new techniques developed for locating spat in the water column, collecting them, and removing them to growout areas. The result was a spectacular rise in the Japanese collections over the last three decades. The development of an optical device by Scott Gallager, WHOI, to locate phytoplankton in the water column, led to this project. The Scallop Recruitment Group was formed, prepared a successful grant to the Northeast Consortium to integrate information from several elements: juvenile and adult surveys from the Northeast Center, DNA fingerprinting to attempt to identify population structures, larval identification package which this project developed, water temperature and GIS somatic index, what time the scallops spawn and what time would be most appropriate to put out collectors. The strategy was to mount this device on ships of opportunity with a high revisit time. He then described his experiences on the Kathy Marie, a scallop vessel out of New Bedford. He reviewed the satellite date used to define where the fishing fleet spends its time. The telemetry package on board the ship sends its data each hour to a satellite from which it can be accessed on shore. The two cameras capture each particle encountered. These are identified from a look-up table of 70,000 images. The package, which does this, is on its second iteration, and is even being further improved and shrinking in size.

Sanjay Tiwari went on to describe how one can identify larval images with polarizing microscopy. This birefringement technology is being used to identify people through iris imaging. With polarizing light, repeated structures, such as in scallop spat, can be seen and used as unique identifying colored markers. In light microscopy they appear all identical. He demonstrated this with a series of images from juvenile scallops and related shellfish. This technique, called the Gabor Transform, has been used successfully to identify other species. In this you generate a set of generic patterns which you use for comparison. From these comparisons you generate a number. When these are run against a set of known standards, one can determine the degree of certainty of the identification of the unknown. Six different rotations are used for each sample. He showed a number of examples to demonstrate these points. When we run these images against bivalves we get about 80% accuracy. There are two ways of expansion. One is to extend the number of species examined. The other is to shorten the time of identification such as if the image is incomplete or condensed. Thus to make an identification with very sparse data. We are looking for additional 2 to 20 day old larvae to image. Rick York asked whether in George's Bank you would only see several species. Richard Taylor agreed that in certain times of the year scallop beds would predominate but you also have muscles beds, Icelandic scallop beds, giant spisula, razor clams and numerous other animals.

Richard Taylor then showed several maps from the data collected at WHOI from the satellite connection. These maps show a number of parameters (sea surface temperature, salinity, animal species, etc) for a given date. This is just the first iteration as to how to get the data out. This is not a trivial problem. He also showed where several spat bags were let out a later collected. These contained about 3,500 spat peer bag. This might prove economically viable. The political question is where to growout these animals.

He second collaborative effort is sea scallop assessment. The existing assessment method by the U.S. is 500 one mile tows by the vessel Albatross over the entire shelf. Kevin Stokesury from SMAST has put together a visual survey. The modern technology of video cameras or sequential stills allows real time photographing of the bottom. This will provide a more comprehensive survey than either of the earlier described methods.

Jonathan Howland, who works in the deep submersible lab at WHOI, builds vehicles, sensors and cameras. We have been developing an imaging system and a software system for looking at the sea floor. Originally the system was developed for a towed sled. We also wanted to extend this to robotic vehicles. The original system was a video camera. In more than 40 meters deep waters, you can not run these systems on fiber optics. With computers and etherlinks we moved to autonomous vehicles. He illustrated this approach with some picture taken with an autonomous vehicle off Puerto Rico. They think this is the way to monitor the seabed avoiding the crashes encountered with towed sleds. Look ahead sonar helps to avoid running into object during a search. The one problem is relocating the autonomous vehicle to recover them.

Richard Taylor concluded that these approaches will be very helpful to the New England Fisheries Council as they address what lives where, which habitats are where, and thus which fishing and aquaculture activities will take place where offshore. What in the long run is going to be done where? Offshore zoning. Jack Pearce recalled earlier efforts by the English navy and others to use television cameras to monitor the ocean floor. Unfortunately these efforts were not followed up. He stressed the need for in depth funding if this approach is to be successful.

Molecular analysis of Scallop Diversity - Alan Kuzirian

Current and future research directions of the Program in Scientific Aquaculture at the Marine Biological Laboratory - Rick Goetz

The Wild Scallop Stock Enhancement Project: a fishing community based project Past, Present, and Future - Marsden Brewer

Harlyn O. Halvorson