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.
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.
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).