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New England scallopers are looking at another tough year in 2025, as they prepare for a set of federal regulations to protect both their livelihoods and the Atlantic Ocean’s scallop populations.
If approved and implemented by NOAA Fisheries, the new rules, called Scallop Framework 39, will reduce the number of times that full-time vessels can go drag in some federally-managed scalloping grounds — called “access areas” — in the 2025 fishing year. But they will allow these boats more time to scallop in the open ocean.
The start of the access-area scalloping season will also be pushed back from April 1 to May 15, 2025. It will end on March 31, 2026.
These proposed regulations were developed by the New England Fishery Management Council. Scallop industry members and fisheries managers finalized them at the council’s December meeting.
They are meant to conserve the fishery resource as it goes through a period of low productivity. Surveys showed the overall weight of harvestable scallops in New England waters dropped from 2023 to 2024.
Local scallopers and industry representatives say the contents of Framework 39 are not a surprise. Landings have been shrinking over the past four years.
“We’re just tightening the belt, and taking a deep breath, and riding the storm out,” said New Bedford scallop vessel manager and owner Tony Alvernaz.
New scallop growth is unpredictable, though scallopers say the fishery can be cyclical. The good news is that recent surveys showed harvestable scallop populations may start rebounding after 2025.
“I’m hopeful for the future,” said Eric Hansen, a council member on the New England Fishery Management Council and owner of two New Bedford scallop vessels. “We just have to be patient.”
The Atlantic Sea Scallop Research Track Working Group will host a community meeting in New Bedford on Wednesday morning to discuss the changing ecology and management practices in the fishery.
The working group is looking to gather perspectives from fishermen about how they are seeing these changes on the water.
Under the proposed rules for the 2025 season, full-time scallop boats would get two access area trips in 2025, to two federally-managed scalloping grounds southeast of Cape Cod.
Each vessel would be limited to one trip to each area, and to catching 12,000 pounds of scallops per trip. It represents a reduction of one access area trip from the 2024 season, from three total trips to two total trips.
The framework would also allocate 24 days at sea to these vessels to fish the open ocean bottom. That represents an increase of four days at sea from last year.
The council projects fishing year 2025 scallop landings would be roughly 20 million pounds under these regulations. That would generate roughly $350 million to the fishery. Hansen said the coming year’s scallop landings will probably be the lowest in the current cycle, which peaked in 2019.
Scallops in the mid-Atlantic have declined over the last few years, which has further depressed landings. The reasons for the decline are unclear.
Some scientists and fishermen believe it may have been related to warm core rings and changing ocean currents. Other fishermen believe it could be related to offshore wind development.
In light of this decline, scallopers have been focusing fishing efforts on Georges Bank, a large underwater plateau between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia. Yet the numbers of new young scallops appearing there have been average to below-average in recent years, Hansen said.
A glut of vessels is also limiting returns from Georges Bank, and depleting those scalloping grounds, said Sustainable Scalloping Fund attorney Drew Minkiewicz. Prices are keeping scallopers afloat right now, he said. But there is no guarantee those will persist into 2025.
Surveys showed large numbers of new young scallops in the Nantucket Lightship and Georges Bank areas in 2023 and 2024.
There were also many young scallops in the Mid-Atlantic Bight — a seahorse-shaped fishing area stretching from the northern end of Long Island to the Delmarva Peninsula.
If those scallops survive and mature to a harvestable size, the industry should see a big year in 2027. The council has proposed closing those areas to fishing in 2025.
Hopefully, high prices will keep operations afloat this coming year, Hansen said. In 2026, things should start to rebound.
The scallop industry has the most robust science of any East Coast fishery, which backs these predictions, he said.
Minkiewicz agreed the scallop industry has robust science, and that the recruitment results were positive.
Yet he said New England scallopers can’t just bank on 2027 to sustain the fishery long-term; the industry must take action now to keep it going.
If mid-Atlantic scallops don’t come back, Minckiewicz said, the best route to restore the resource on Georges Bank may be enhancement — catching scallop spat in the wild, growing it out, and transplanting it.
He also said fisheries managers should open up the Northern Edge — a robust scalloping ground on Georges Bank that has been closed for decades — and work to reduce overcapacity of vessels in the industry.
Alvernaz understands patience is key when it comes to scalloping. Still, it’s a tough ask when he’s barely getting by right now.
Alvernaz says the cost of “anything” on a boat — gear, food, fuel — has gone up more than 40% over the last couple years. Meanwhile, scallop landings have gone down significantly, and allocations have been cut.
Fisheries managers need to “stop the insanity,” and open up the Northern Edge, Alvernaz said. He added that regulators should be allowing scallopers to put multiple permits on one boat.
Billy Hulbig, a New Bedford scallop boat captain, told the council at its December meeting that the scalloping areas fully open to fishing are in “tough shape.”
Boats are bringing in smaller and smaller scallops, he said. That may be making it harder for the resource to recover.
Hulbig said he doesn’t have a fix for the industry’s challenges, though re-examining survey processes to develop a better way to assess the total weight of harvestable scallops on the seafloor would be “a good place to start.”
That way, fishermen would have a better idea of what is down there to catch, and work to avoid depleting the resource, he said.
The Sustainable Scalloping Fund, the Fisheries Survival Fund, and New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell express support for Scallop Framework 39.
“Although we are concerned that days at sea continue to drop, we are grateful the Council adopted our recommendation, which represents a much better outcome than some of the other proposals,” Mitchell said.
Email environmental reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@newbedfordlight.org.
I know it’s a sacred cow around here. Still, fishing in general is so environmentally damaging that I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off letting it go and pivoting to other industries. This is starting to give me hints of the collapse of the cod fishery in the 90s.
The scallop industry is being affected by a warming climate, the scallops have been dying in the southern beds off of Virginia and the die off has been slowly expanding northwards at a rate of approximately twenty miles per year. The beds are also dying from inshore to offshore. The loss of these beds from Virginia to New Jersey or the most historically productive scallop beds on our Atlantic coast has had devastating impacts on the fleet. This loss was happening before windmills were even being discussed. This loss of productive fishing bottom from global warming has forced the fleet to overcrowd the productive bottom that’s left in New England. In reality we have a math problem in that the scallop producing areas have been reduced by fifty percent but the fleet’s capacity has not been reduced enough to compensate for the loss.