SCALLOP

 

TAMPA BAY SCALLOP and MANATEES ENDANGERED - TAMPA BAY WATCH

Cynthia Barnett in THE SOUND OF THE SEA writes about what's been happening in Tampa, Florida, where the Tampa Bay Scallop has been the symbol of the city as well as the popular shell that tourists buy.

Excerpt page 257:  Where singling algal mats covered the surface of Tampa Bay in the 1970's, sunlight now streaks through clear water across more than 40,000 acres of sea grass.  Manatees have returned with turtles and fishes; the shuttered Tampa Tarpon Tournament is back on.

The turnaround began with touch sewage regulations: Tampa and other cities could no long dump barely treated waste into the bay. Nearby power plants stopped burning coal to cut nitro germ pollution carried from air to water. Programs for farmers and landscapers pared fertilizer runoff.  The Tampa Bay Estuary Program rallied citizens, business people, NGOPs, and government around more than five hundred projects over three decades to restore the region's liquid heart.

None of it has been enough for the Bay Scallop.  State fish and wildlife officials shuttered Florida's harvest in all but the Big Bend while scientists spent year's growing millions of larvae in hatchilings and transferring them to waters where scallops once thrived.  In Tampa Bay and P8ine Island Sound, numbers of zigzagging scallops would dramatically increase following each round.  Then, after a few generations in the wild, the populations would again collapse.

ARE SCALLOPS ENDANGERED? YES and NO!

The term Scallop can refer to any bivalve, however, when it comes to scallops as endangered, it depends on which kind of scallop.  The Great Scallop found around the coasts of Great Britain is endangered. Shells build from calcium in the water.  Acidic water harms that process.  The seas are significantly more acidic then they were a hundred years ago.  So the shells are having difficulty making their shells.  The ocean is also absorbing most of the extra heat and the water temperature is harming the sea creatures.

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ESA JOURNAL LIBRARY - HOW MANY SCALLOPS ARE THERE ANS WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Excerpt:  Scallops (Order Pectinida) have had a tumultuous existence over the past 245 million years, bearing witness to numerous transformations in ocean conditions and surviving two mass extinctions...

SWIMMING SCALLOPS - NOT JUST SHELLS