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Numerous scallops washed up on the shore on Friday, spreading mystery over a mile-long stretch of Satellite Beach.
Local beachgoers say they’ve never seen anything like it, while state biologists — as they investigate the case — speculate that wind and waves brought them in.
Others are not so sure.
“Our Fish and Wildlife Health staff have samples and are continuing their investigations,” Carly Jones, a spokeswoman for the state’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, said Friday. “It is very likely that they were washed up by a combination of wind and/or wave swell.”
Kevin Johnson, a professor of Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, doubts that is the case.
“Their typical habitat is 30-40 meters deep,” Johnson said Friday. “I don’t think we’ve had wind that could do that without any help. I believe something weakened or killed them before they washed ashore.’
Johnson said the scallops are “alive and dying or just dead”.
The soft tissue between their shells was visible, he noted. “That’s their internal viscera, including foot, gills, adductors, etc.”
“So this poses a bit of a mystery — sudden mass death,” Johnson added. “Had we had an unusual storm (wind/shaggy waves) then I would speculate that they would have simply been driven out of their sandy subtidal habitat. But we haven’t really had such a storm and their habitat is usually 30 meters deep or Lake.”
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Although harvested commercially in the past, calico scallops collapsed as a commercial business four decades ago.
“Like so many fish and shellfish that have been over-harvested, it’s hard to find any very large ones,” Johnson said.
If the dead and dying scallops were located 10 or 20 feet from the beach, Johnson said he would think someone would have caught them and poured them nearby.
But the greater expanse along the beach suggests some sort of “natural” phenomenon.”
Calico scallops can be found all over the Florida coast.
“If their plight is natural, something has weakened their ability to stay in their home on the sandy seabed,” Johnson added.
Possibilities of why they washed ashore include disease (viral, bacterial, fungal); extreme temperatures; rapid changes in ocean salinity; and parasites, he added.
According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission website, “Infection by a parasite of the genus Marteilia may have been responsible for a calico scallop population crash recorded in 1991 off the coast of Cape Canaveral off Florida’s east coast. parasite seems to infest the digestive tract of the calico-scallop gland to such an extent that they starve.”
Jim Waymer is an environmental reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Waymer at 321-261-5903 or [email protected]. Or find him on Twitter: @JWayEnviro or on Facebook: www.facebook.com/jim.waymer
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This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Scallops wash up on Florida’s Satellite Beach, an enigmatic FWC, biologists
