Hatching a Market in Pocasset

There could be a day in the not-so-distant future when a person hungry for a plate of richly-sweet fresh Atlantic bay scallops will be able to sit down and gobble them up…in July! Dr. Daniel Ward and his team of scientists and fishermen at Ward Aquafarms and Scallop Bay Shellfish Company (SBSC) are hard at work growing oysters, clams, and bay scallops in their state-of-the-art fish hatchery in Pocasset. In part, the goal is to expand the availability of fresh bay scallops beyond just a few short months.

“If you weren’t here on November first, you wouldn’t know what they taste like,” says Jeff Lang, Dan Ward’s business partner. Indeed, the wild population has continued to dwindle for decades. Forces such as the loss of their preferred natural habitat, eelgrass, have made bay scallops a scarcity on menus and in fish markets. A season’s harvest of bays, which begins in November, had diminished with each passing year. Not long ago, if you didn’t seize the opportunity to enjoy them by the end of December, you missed out for the year. There have been efforts underway for some time to restore eelgrass meadows, like the one spearheaded by the Nantucket Land Council, which is trying to reverse the attrition. This past year, bay scallops were still found in restaurants and fish markets through March.

New Hampshire native Dan Ward first experienced aquaculture aboard a lobster boat in the waters off New Hampshire as he worked towards his master’s degree at the University of New Hampshire. As he finished at UNH, Ward accepted a position at Marine Biological Laboratories (MBL) in Woods Hole in aquaculture. Now relocated to Falmouth, Ward began operating his own small 2.6-acre aquaculture farm, Ward Aquafarms, in 2012 in Megansett Harbor in North Falmouth. Around this time, Ward entered a PhD program at the University of Rhode Island and received his doctorate in 2014. That is a lot for one young man. “I was working in Woods Hole at MBL and going to grad school at URI. So, I was commuting from Falmouth to URI two hours each way every day,” he remembers with a chuckle. It was at this point he realized he needed to make a career decision. “Do I go academia, professor, tenure and that whole route, or go to the commercial side?” For Ward, one aspect made the choice clear. “I realized that not all of the work that I was doing in grad school, and the work that I saw around me, was directly applicable to growing the aquaculture industry. It’s important to me to continue to develop commercial aquaculture in the United States in a sustainable way. It’s why I got into this in the first place,” he states.

As Ward grew the business, he began to experiment with growing bay scallops. “Hatcheries wouldn’t do bay scallop seed until it was too late in the season,” he recalls. Hatcheries were busy growing the more established (and profitable) oyster and clam seeds for their aquaculture clients. Only after they had filled those orders would they turn to Ward’s bay scallop seed request. So, he began to raise his own and made some technological breakthroughs along the way in areas such as water flow and cage sizing. Unlike the upweller systems used for clams and oysters, where nutrient-rich sea water is pumped through the cages from below and removed with a top-mounted outflow pipe, Ward reversed the flow of water to create a downweller system for the simple reason that unlike the other bivalves, scallops can swim. The upweller was allowing the scallops to escape through the top-mounted outflow pipe. The downweller holds them in place in enlarged trays that permit the scallops the space they need to grow without overcrowding. According to Ward, scallops require a far lower stocking density within their nets than oysters do. If things get a bit congested, the scallops will stop growing.

When Barlow’s Boatyard in Pocasset went on the market, Ward and Lang saw an opportunity to turn this small 40-boat marina into a first-rate hatchery, while maintaining the marina’s original duties for the care and storage of its members’ boats on a bend of the Pocasset River. The old building, with its dirt floors and lack of insulation, was transformed into the now pristine facility that produces shellfish seed for the newly-formed Scallop Bay Shellfish Company’s oyster, clam, and bay scallop grants dotted throughout the Cape and across Buzzards Bay in Wareham. Additionally, SBSC supplies seed wholesale to other shellfish farmers, aids in the research projects of partnering organizations such as MBL, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the University of Massachusetts, while also providing seed for municipal shellfish propagation projects in Bourne, Dennis, Falmouth, and Orleans.

Upon first look, the large space of the hatchery is filled with dozens of open-air tanks that hold the oyster, clam and bay scallop seed batches. Pipes traverse the space between the tanks and overhead, where clear plastic tubes hang down to tanks below, delivering the algae upon which the shellfish feed. A series of vertical tubes along one side of the room are roiling with what looks like two-toned grains of sand. These are the oyster seed growing from a microscopic size to one millimeter before being moved to outdoor tanks to continue their growth. The darker top few inches are the seed, while the tan-colored bulk of the “sand” is crushed up pieces of oyster shell called cultch. It’s the substrate upon which the oysters have attached. A few tanks toward one end of the room are covered. These are reserved for the bay scallop broodstock. The insulated tanks keep the water consistent with the temperature in which the animals were living in the wild, around 40 degrees in the winter, gradually warming to 70 degrees to condition them to spawn.

“We’ll have them [the bay scallop broodstock] intentionally spawn a few times before replacing them,” hatchery manager Mike Coute points out. “We make them feel like it’s July,” he chuckles. Scallops spawn in July when water temperatures rise, and there is more daylight. Mike and his team will increase both factors, and the scallops naturally respond by releasing millions of eggs and sperm into the water. Scallops are hermaphroditic and can alternate between the two sexes in successive spawns. He goes on to explain, “We’ll have them spawn once a week. It takes a day for them to catch their breath. Then we’ll start to feed them again, condition them, and build them back up [for another spawning event].” After a few spawns they are returned to their cages at one of the hatchery’s grants. “Although, I usually eat them, if I’m being honest,” Mike laughs.

Sea water is drawn into the hatchery directly from the Pocasset River, and it is repeatedly filtered down to a level that allows only one micron of impurities to flow through. Some of the water is directed to the algae room where it is further purified for the nine different types of algae the hatchery grows to feed the shellfish. The water is filtered to a level of 0.01 micron per milliliter. This is needed so the staff can closely monitor the algae’s purity, and they need to grow a lot of it. The algae cultures are grown in 400-liter tanks which have LED grow lights attached and oxygen bubbling up through the deep, vibrant green algae. “We grow five to ten million cells of algae per milliliter, so each tank holds hundreds of trillions of cells of algae,” Coute explains.

Once grown, the algae are pumped into a storage tank in the main room with all the shellfish at their various growth stages. A bank of nine wall-mounted pumps clicks with a rhythmic syncopation as they pull the algae up and send it to the awaiting bivalves. “At the larval stage, we’ve got to be very careful how much food we feed them,” Mike says. As harmful as too little food can be, too much can be dangerous. “It’d be like letting your Golden Retriever feed itself,” he laughs.

Bay scallops spend the first two weeks of their lives as free-swimming larvae. After that, the scallop finds a substrate (preferably eelgrass) and attaches to it by producing byssal threads to secure itself. Byssal threads are similar to the “beards” of mussels that attach themselves to rocks or pilings. Underwater grasses are needed to keep the juvenile scallops off the sea floor and away from predatory crabs. Once fully grown, scallops use the vision of their tiny blue eyes lining the edge of their shell to see predators coming and swim away. “We raise these bay scallops past their vulnerable stage,” Jeff Lang explains.

From the hatchery, the scallops are transferred into Japanese-lantern-style nets up to ten feet long for maturing. Small creatures like glass shrimp and minnows can swim through, but those hungry crabs are kept out. They become something of an artificial reef as it promotes sea life growth around them. Unlike oyster grants, whose cages can be seen from the shoreline across the Cape, many of Scallop Bay Shellfish Company’s nets are suspended underneath docks, and are not connected to the sea floor or riverbed. They, like oysters, are filter feeders that reduce the impact of elevated nitrogen levels doing tremendous damage to our waterways. Ward and his team have found that bay scallops are far superior to oysters in removing nitrogen from the water. This was confirmed by an independent third-party laboratory.

A lack of peer-reviewed published studies on this subject points to the fact that bay scallop hatcheries are just in their nascent stage. “What you find for studies is oyster,” Ward explains. “Of course it’s all oysters, because they worked with oyster farmers on the Cape, and that’s ninety-six percent of what we produce.” SBSC already has numerous grants in production in Buzzards Bay, the Herring River in Harwich, and Lonnie’s Pond in Orleans. A benefit for any abutters to the grants, who may have concerns about the traffic and active work time on the sites, is that bay scallops are handled far less than oysters, whose cages and bags need to be turned every one to two weeks.

One success story in the making is playing out on Bass River. Jeff Lang met Friends of Bass River Executive Director Rick Bishop, and SBSC is working with the non-profit organization to return bay scallops to Bass River where they once thrived – decades ago. “I can remember scalloping with my dad, and we’d have our limit in two drags,” Bishop recalls. The organization purchased forty of the lantern nets, and SBSC provided 100,000 bay scallop seeds, half the size of a pinky fingernail each, last summer. “We installed them at the Town of Yarmouth Packet Landing Marina at the very end of August,” Bishop says. “We watched them very carefully all of September and October, and on November first at 6:30 in the morning, I had my first raw scallop for breakfast, and it was delicious!” The scallops were then broadcast out into the river to be ready for harvest later this year. “We started with two residential-sized coolers of seed in August, and on November first we had eighteen commercial-size totes full of scallops.” The Town of Dennis is joining in the effort this year, and Friends of Bass River are looking to expand the project to 150,000-200,000 seed for 2025.

On the wholesale side, SBSC has managed to crack the problem of shipping fresh bay scallops across town or across the country while keeping the scallops alive throughout the journey. Oysters and clams completely seal themselves shut with seawater trapped inside and can survive shipping in mesh bags which are exposed to the open (and refrigerated) air. Scallop shells are open on either side of their hinge and quickly dry out and die if exposed to the air for any length of time. Dan, Jeff, and the SBSC team devised a packaging system that seals twenty-five scallops inside a durable, clear bag for transport. If kept sufficiently cool, the scallops can last a week or more. The company has already begun supplying Michelin-starred restaurants throughout the country with orders. “We’ve landed on twenty-five per bag,” Dan explains. “Because once you cut open a bag, the clock is ticking.” A restaurant doesn’t have to open a larger bag of say, one hundred scallops, and hope they go through them in a night. “These places expect them to be ten out of ten (on a quality scale), and these scallops are that, even days later,” he proudly states.

Ward, Lang, and the team at Scallop Bay Shellfish Company have a grand vision for not just the company, but for the industry. What they’re doing by supplying bay scallop seed to other shell fishermen is building a market. In addition to oyster and clam seed, SBSC currently supplies bay scallop seed to shellfish farmers from Maine to Virginia. They also sell the specialized equipment needed to raise the scallops “You’re thinking small if you say, ‘oh, this is the new thing we did. We need to be kings of it,’” Ward says. They are thinking more broadly. “I don’t view this as competition. There’s plenty of market to go around. The more people who grow them (bay scallops), the more the market will grow for all of us. We’re just the ones helping to kick it off. Another product the farmers can grow in Massachusetts, so we’re not growing ninety-six percent of the exact same thing.”

As the rising tide lifts all boats, this tide could be awash in bay scallops someday soon.

Along with being co-publisher of Edible Cape Cod with his wife Cori, Larry Egan is a New England Associated Press award-winning writer and commentator and host of the talk show The Handyman Hotline on Saturdays from 1-3 pm on 95.1 WXTK-FM. He can often be found on the trails of Cape Cod being worn out by his personal trainer: their Portuguese Water Dog, Archie.

Scallop Bay Shellfish Company/Ward Aquafarms
ScallopBayShellfish.com
WardAquafarms.com

Friends of Bass River
FriendsOfBassRiver.org