NY - Peconic Bay Scallop Harvest Collapses - Most Of The Shellfish Are Dead

[hatrack]

The sweet and briny flavor of an adult Peconic Bay scallop is the result of 18 to 22 months of good living in bays of glacial till and silty mud. They must be eaten within hours of being caught, and some baymen eat them on the half-shell as they fish. An essential dish at East End holiday dinners, Peconic Bay scallops cost upward of $30 a pound in a fish store, although in recent years strong supply has kept the price closer to $25.

By the night before the season opened last year, Charlie Manwaring, owner of Southold Fish Market, had distributed about 300 bushel bags to his suppliers — scallopers going out for the harvest. This year it was fewer than 30 bags. Even that was hoping for too much. They returned with nothing. “I can’t remember as bad as this,” Mr. Manwaring said. “And I’ve been doing this a long time. This year has got us all shocked.” With that, Mr. Manwaring left the store in charge of his sister and went hunting.

EDIT

The season in Massachusetts opened a few days before New York, and baymen there were finding a solid set of bay scallops this year, after a bad 2018. But New York’s bay scallops are living close to the edge, unable to tolerate water hotter than the mid-80s. They are particularly stressed by temperature spikes that also stimulate them to spawn. Water temperatures reached the mid-80s several times this past summer, according to a U.S. Geological Survey station gathering data in Orient Harbor.

Baymen were the first to know that something disastrous had happened to this year’s adult Peconic Bay scallop population. On the Friday before opening day, the East End Maritime Museum was filled with an audience of concerned baymen, environmental officials, and local scallop-lovers who wanted to hear from Stephen Tettelbach, a shellfish ecologist with the Cornell Cooperative Extension, on what they already knew would be a terrible season.

EDIT

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/nyregion/peconic-bay-scallop-season.html

[ret5hd]

1. Well, there's only one real solution...

Vote repug, deny climate change, and pretend everything is just rosy.

See, isn't that better!

[mountain grammy]

2. Exactly!

and just look at all those other countries, polluting the earth. It's all their fault.

Now, all better.

[Boomer]

3. This is the new normal, at least until things get worse

What the general population doesn't seem to have grasped about climate change is that we're baked in to present-day conditions for thousands of years. If (when) things change, it will be in one direction only: worse.

There's no going back, no matter what we do now. And if we continue to pour more CO2 into the air (which we will), the climate will get worse and stay that way for thousands of years.