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For the past five years, New Jersey scallop fisherman Brady Lybarger has been spending more time in New Bedford. Scallop yields have been poor in the mid-Atlantic’s historic scalloping grounds, known as the Elephant Trunk. So Lybarger makes the 250-mile voyage from Cape May, New Jersey’s southernmost point, out to Georges Bank, east of Cape Cod.
Fuel is expensive, so Lybarger docks his vessel in New Bedford during the busy summer season. Between trips, he drives six hours each way to New Jersey to spend time with his family.
With 25 years in the fishing industry, Lybarger says the sacrifice is nothing new.
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“No one wants to be away, right?” Lybarger said. “But you also got to go make money.”
Lybarger is part of a growing cohort of fishermen docking their vessels in New Bedford while calling another port home. Since 2016, the number of these “transient” vessels has increased over 300%, while scallop landings in mid-Atlantic and southern ports have declined.
The shift, some researchers say, is driven by climate change: ocean temperatures and acid levels are rising unevenly across the Eastern Seaboard. As scallops react to warming waters, fishermen are following suit — spending more time and landing more shellfish in New Bedford. It’s a boon for the Whaling City, but it’s a challenge for the southern ports left behind.
“We’re getting decimated,” said Sean Barto, the vice president of Sea Gear Marine Supply in Cape May. “It’s been straight downhill for the past five or six years.”
The shift may further consolidate an industry that’s already tough for independent fishermen, driving an even greater portion of fishing wealth into New Bedford’s privileged few.
The shifting tides aren’t enough to make Lybarger leave his home port behind entirely, though he’s willing to consider it someday.
“From what I’ve seen in the past 20 years, [New Bedford] has turned around,” Lybarger said. “I wouldn’t mind living in New Bedford, be honest with you. It’s not my top choice, but I wouldn’t mind it if I had to.”
Shell shock
New Bedford has been the dominant commercial scallop port since the 1980s, driven in part by its proximity to the rich scallop beds off of Georges Bank.
But for the past five years, Becca Selden, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Wellesley College, has observed an even greater portion of the country’s scallops landing in New Bedford — likely driven by the effects of climate change. Of those landings, a growing proportion come from vessels not home-ported in New Bedford, Selden said. Some of the sharpest increases come from the out-of-towners from Virginia and Cape May.
“It’s not that there are fewer boats that have New Bedford as a home port and are landing there, but it’s just that there’s an increasing proportion of them that are from outside,” Selden said.
These trends correspond to federal data that shows scallops don’t thrive as well in warmer waters. Instead, they’re growing more than ever in colder regions previously scarce in scallops.
“Thirty years ago, there was substantial scallop fishing off of Virginia,” NOAA Fisheries operations research analyst Dvora Hart said in an email. “Today, the southern edge of the sea scallop fishery is over 100 miles north, off of Delaware. Overall scallop productivity in the mid-Atlantic has declined, leading to a majority of the fishery moving north to Georges Bank.”
Hart added that scallops could also be sensitive to ocean acidification, the process in which carbon dioxide absorbs into the ocean. Climate change and fossil fuel emissions both accelerate ocean acidification by introducing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and increasing the water’s capacity to absorb it.
Ocean acidification could be making scallop shells thinner, Hart said, but its effects won’t be apparent for several decades.
These factors don’t mean that scallops — although highly mobile compared to most shellfish — literally move north when it gets too warm, like some fish species might, Selden said. It just means that scallops seem to thrive better in cooler conditions, and those conditions are increasingly found up north.
In recent years, scallop fishermen have also found success in the northern part of the Gulf of Maine, once considered too cold for the valuable bivalve.
The problem, Selden said, is that scientists and fishery management officials know relatively little about the scallop populations in the Northern Gulf of Maine Scallop Management Area, making it difficult to set sustainable catch limits. (This year, 180 boats descended upon the Northern Gulf of Maine management area to compete for their share of a 400,000-pound quota. With so many boats in the water, Lybarger estimated they would hit quota in just 11 days.)
Federal and local researchers don’t currently include the northern Gulf of Maine in their scallop surveys and stock assessments, but Selden hopes that changes sooner rather than later.
“It’s going to be important for folks moving forward,” Selden said.
Treading water
Both Lybarger and Selden said these trends have greater impacts on independent fishing vessels with fewer resources, since owners of multiple boats can often better afford the fuel and crews necessary for longer trips. One way that independent fishermen can insulate themselves from risk is by fishing for a wide variety of species, diversifying their portfolio, so to speak. But Selden acknowledged that current fisheries management practices don’t always make that easy.
“It is concerning that [these trends] might mean that only the large boats remain viable,” Selden said.
Support services in New Jersey and Virginia — ice, fuel services, and cold storage — also lose out when their customers tie up in New Bedford.
Between 2004 and 2024, Barto said roughly 75% of Sea Gear Marine Supply’s business came from commercial scallopers, packing about 100 boats a year pre-pandemic. For the past five years, he said that number is closer to about a dozen boats.
“We’re just treading water,” Barto said.
New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said he’s been calling attention to the worker migration for years. The growing number of transient vessels is a “double-edged sword,” Mitchell said, disproportionately benefiting New Bedford but weakening the industry as a whole. As ports dry up, fewer elected officials are willing to push back on what the industry views as unfair federal management of the fishery.
“The pie overall on the East Coast has gotten smaller, but New Bedford’s share of it has gotten bigger,” Mitchell said.
The influx has also led to overcrowding on New Bedford’s waterfront, an issue Mitchell hopes to mitigate with a permit-stacking proposal that would allow vessel owners to retire their oldest boats.
New Bedford Port Authority Executive Director Gordon Carr, who’s been in his position three years, isn’t sure he’s noticed an increase in Southern lilts on the docks.
“The one thing I’ve heard is just humorously, the joke of the symphony of the different accents on our docks these days –when you think of people from Maine and from Massachusetts and Virginia and New Jersey, and then you also have the Guatemalans, the United Nations of accents on our docks,” Carr said. “I have never heard anything negative about that. I think it’s kind of a cool feature.”
The Elephant Trunk reopens
Despite these trends, some researchers think the mid-Atlantic’s time may come back around.
Kevin Stokesbury, dean of the School for Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has spent his 40-plus year career studying the scallop fishery. His work on the industry’s first-ever bicameral scallop survey rejuvenated the waning port of New Bedford by proving there were scallops in previously undetected quantities.
When Stokesbury looks at the next few years’ forecast, he sees a glimmer of hope for his mid-Atlantic neighbors.
The Elephant Trunk scallop fishing area off the coast of New Jersey has seen a promising crop of young scallops, Stokesbury said, and it may rival the yields off Georges Bank in a few years. He added that scallop activity is notoriously cyclical, making it difficult to count on or count out any particular habitat.
This year, the Elephant Trunk is accessible to open bottom scallop fishing, meaning fishermen can begin to take harvest. But Selden cautions against counting your scallops before they hatch.
“Even though they’re there, they might not grow as well as they have in the past,” Selden said. “So I think that kind of dampens or gives us a little bit of pause.”
Hart, too, estimated the current mid-Atlantic crop, driven by a bout of colder water, may only last for the next two years.
The decision to open Elephant Trunk offers a temporary boost to Barto’s struggling business. But it’s difficult for Barto to celebrate completely, he said.
“If they had waited, it would have been a good-producing closed area for about a decade,” Barto said. “We’re not here for the short run, we’re here for the long run.”
Lybarger agreed. This summer, he’ll be staying closer to home fishing for groundfish — although he won’t rule out a scallop trip out of New Bedford if the conditions are right.
“It’s like cutting down a Christmas tree when the tree is two [feet] tall,” Lybarger said. “You’ve still got to replace that tree and let it grow back. So if you’re impatient again and next year there’s only a one-year-old tree … that’s the scenario you’re in. You’ve got people who need to make that money to make a living, so they’ll cut anything they need to.”
Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
More stories by Brooke Kushwaha
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