By John Pappalardo
The Fishermen’s Alliance recently accomplished a profound breakthrough, combining three key goals into one new initiative:
- Support independent fishermen and improve economic opportunities.
- Engage with great scientists to help protect stocks and the industry’s future, bringing fishermen hands-on into the research.
- Convince federal regulators to support us in creating smart policies and financial incentives.
This success focuses on one fishery that itself has been a great success story:
Scalloping.
Here on the Cape we have a robust “dayboat” scallop fleet that lands between 200 and 800 pounds per trip per boat. With prices that hover around $16-20 a pound, that can be a good day’s pay for captain and crew.
In New Bedford much bigger scallop boats head offshore for a week or more and can land 10,000 pounds a trip. Scallop is why New Bedford has been the country’s top port, ranked first in catch value for 23 consecutive years.
It wasn’t always this way.
A couple decades ago the scallop industry was in big trouble. Stocks had been nearly wiped out, scallop dredges scoured the bottom even where only a few animals showed up, disturbing and killing seed before it could grow.
Industry members knew they needed to change, and sat down with federal managers to create a great alternative, the Research Set Aside Program, RSA. Commit a small share of scallop quota and its resulting revenue every year, scallopers taking some short-term profit out of their pockets, to pay for scientific research. Use that research to manage the fishery: RSA-funded surveys identify where big scallops are located, close off areas where lots of seed and small stock are growing. These areas are rotated like crops on a farm, opening new areas ready for harvest and giving old ones time to revive. Annual surveys don’t just identify where to go and where not to go, they help calculate what a total harvest should be to keep the resource healthy. Lo and behold it worked. The scallop industry came back strong, and the RSA program continues to this day, with expanded secondary priorities beyond supporting the annual surveys.
One more detail makes this approach even smarter:
To fund research projects selected by federal fisheries managers (not the industry), scientific teams are directly awarded pounds of scallop quota instead of dollars. Scientists work with scallop fishermen to catch the quota and a portion of all RSA trips’ gross profit (approximately 25 percent) becomes the revenue needed to fund the research. This also provides scallopers who participate in RSA with more pounds to land, increasing fishing opportunities.
This year, when Caitlin Townsend, our working waterfront outreach coordinator, was working with and learning from scallopers offshore, a theme emerged:
If we could identify and protect “hot spot” areas that scallopers locate as they work – big sets of seed and small scallops not ready for harvest but a gold mine for the future – in as close to real time as possible, we could make a huge sustainable leap forward.
Melissa Sanderson, our chief operating officer, turned Caity’s recon into a detailed federal application, a multi-year RSA proposal to “protect scallop seed and maximize yield” through the development of the Scallop Seed Avoidance Program. Researchers and scientific partners were identified, with expertise in creating a similar program to prevent salmon bycatch in the Alaskan pollock fishery. Scallopers from the Cape as well as big boat operators across the region would work with them to co-design a voluntary reporting system to identify key areas to temporarily protect. The results would be shared across the fleet to prevent harvesting the small scallops, in hopes of creating a new, smarter way to make harvests both cleaner and in the long term, more profitable.
The application has passed a rigorous, competitive review and chances are high it will be selected for an RSA award. Once final approval is granted, our team will hit the ground running. From September 2026 to June 2028, the project will provide $2.25 million in gross revenue to the participating scallopers and $750,000 to cover research expenses.
That’s amazing in itself. It also means that local scallopers will have access to additional quota that fund the RSA program, another major boon for the Cape and our small-boat fishermen, a silver lining in a year when the allowable catch is 75 percent less than it was a decade ago.
Congrats to the team here, and the scallopers we work with. Can’t wait to see what we all learn together.
John Pappalardo is CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance