Tampa Bay Watch is recruiting volunteer boats to participate in the Great Bay Scallop Search, Saturday, August 26. The event is a resource monitoring program where community volunteers snorkel to search for scallops in select areas within Boca Ciega and Lower Tampa Bay. The event has been conducted annually since 1993 with the goal to monitor and document the health and status of the local bay scallop population. Tampa Bay Watch aims to have 40 volunteer boaters with more than 180 participants at search selected sites for the elusive bay scallops. Volunteers with shallow draft boats are needed for the event. Go to tampabaywatch.org for more information.
Some years, volunteers find many scallops and other years they don’t. Factors that may affect the scallop population include water quality, red tide, high rainfall and storms.
An all-time high for the event was 674 scallops, found in 2009. Bay scallops, disappeared from Tampa Bay in the early 1960s when the bay water was highly polluted from dredging operations and industrial and municipal wastes. Tampa Bay’s water quality and seagrass beds have since improved to levels that will once again support the bay scallop population. In fact, a 2014 research by Southwest Florida Water Management District’s Surface Water Improvement and Management Program states that Tampa Bay now supports 40,295 acres of seagrass beds, an equivalent amount of seagrass measured as in the 1950s.
Reservations required for the Great Bay Scallop Search. Registered scallop searchers will meet Saturday, August 26 at 9 am at the Fort De Soto Boat Ramp in Tierra Verde to receive survey equipment and instructions for the monitoring event. At each site, a weighted transect line 50 meters in length is laid along seagrass beds.
Snorkelers count scallops along each side of the transect line, within one meter of each side, creating a 100 square meter survey area.
The 2017 Scallop Search is sponsored by the Sea World Busch Gardens Conservation Fund and the Tampa Bay Estuary Program.
Information courtesy of Tampa Bay Watch. For more information on events, volunteering or becoming a member, call 727-867-8166 or visit www.tampabaywatch.org.