Shellfish departments across the Island are making efforts to adapt to several environmental factors that hampered last season’s bay scallop harvest. At the forefront of that effort is the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group (MVSG), which just celebrated 50 years of preserving and promoting the Island’s shellfish stock.
MVSG raises and distributes bay scallop seed to the town’s shellfish departments from late July to the end of summer hatchery season, with different ponds seeded for optimal water flow and where the grown scallops can be eventually accessible to shellfishers and the public. Both scallops and oysters are typically placed in spat bags, single-use mesh totes that help them grow, but these bags can be used only once, and are hard to clean. Spat, juvenile shellfish, are just visible to the naked eye.
But as several environmental conditions contributed to a smaller harvest this past season, Island officials are reconsidering how they will seed the ponds this summer, or rather, through what vehicle.
Bay scallops were harder to catch this past commercial season, which runs from November to end of March, than the previous year, but the price was actually better, at an average of $28 per pound over the average of $14 the previous year, according to David Berube, who’s shellfished in Edgartown for the past 56 years. Gus Leaf of Menemsha Fish Market said the wholesale price for bay scallops on Island was $30 on average for last season’s haul. The fishermen’s price was between $25 and $32, Menemsha Fish Market owner Stanley Larsen said. He blamed the harvest downturn on a lack of eelgrass and pollution.
The scallop beds were not as thick as in the previous year, Berube said. But he could still hit his limit of three bushels of scallops a day by fishing for a couple of extra hours. Seed stock for this next season is looking more positive, he said, because Edgartown has fairly decent scalloping seasons compared with other towns on Island, Berube said.
Bay scallops grow from seed to harvestable size in the span of two years, and the shellfish departments won’t know what this year’s crop of seed will look like until after the summer.
In order to help propagate a better season for this fall and winter season, the Tisbury shellfish department built a tidal upweller — a floating dock containing 16 mesh boxes of shellfish in the water at higher densities than a spat bag — over the winter at the Edgartown shellfish department offices on Meetinghouse Way. It’s used to more efficiently grow bay scallops, oysters, and quahogs. It was part of the town’s attempt to move away from using spat bags, which are typically single-use and can be degraded by other marine life.
According to Edgartown Shellfish Constable Robert Morrison, the town’s shellfish department added another upweller over the winter, to total three for its shellfish aquaculture projects. In 2025, Oak Bluffs also installed a new upweller that saw immediate biological benefits, according to the annual town report for the shellfish department.
The hope is that these tidal upwellers help stem the downturned tide of the bay scallop population. MVSG Executive Director Emma Green-Beach said the conditions were not perfect for growing baby scallops, or there may have been a die-off over the winter.
According to the 2025 Chilmark shellfish department report, there were very few adult scallops available for harvest, as the shellfish propagation program had very low survival rates. This past scalloping season, Edgartown harvested approximately 3,000 bushels, while the previous year, they totaled a little more than 10,000 bushels, according to Morrison.
The bay scalloping season for Tisbury was also not a great year, and the town had to close its season early, in mid-January, according to Danielle Ewart, shellfish constable of Tisbury. Ewart said, however, that the juvenile scallops made it through the icy winter in the ponds with a healthy amount of seed stock. Last season, there were 47.5 total bushels, compared with 201 bushels in 2024, according to a Tisbury shellfish department report.
Other challenges for healthy propagation include disease. A kidney parasite called bay scallop marosporida (BSM) was present in some bay scallops on the Island, according to a 2024 Chilmark Town Report. There is some evidence, however, that now the Island’s bay scallops may be more resistant, with cold winters making it harder for the parasite to spread, Green-Beach said.
The MVSG has been working with Stony Brook University Marinetics Endowed Professor Bassem Allam and the Cornell Cooperative Extension to research the BSM parasite and why some bay scallops remain productive despite infection.
“There are a lot of stages in which they die, and so our job is to keep growing the seed for the towns to plant out to help increase those numbers of adults that will have the chance to spawn the following year,” Green-Beach said.
The seed set also depends on the larger regional weather and climate conditions, as well as the food quality for the bay scallops, Green-Beach said. Shellfish are not always linear, and not always easy to predict, due to the natural cycles of each season.
“A lot can go right, and a lot can go wrong between now and October, when the family season opens, or November when commercial season opens,” Morrison said.