Scallop spat

Well, yesterday was the last spat collector day of the season... Spat collectors, essentially mesh bags suspended in the water column, collect larval mollusks, crustaceans, squirts, and sometimes even fish... We use them to track scallop settlement throughout the Peconic Bays, in order to see approximate numbers and areas where they are being transported... Towards the end of the season, we do visual benthic surveys along transects at the spat collector locations to see if what we are catching in the nets is translating to the bottom... In other words, if we have a location where we get alot of spat in the bags, but no seed on the bottom when we do our visual surveys, we can assume that there is some source of high post settlement mortality, which in many cases is predation... I digress from the subject... The collectors are collected every 6 weeks and there are 2 sets which are off-set 3 weeks apart to ensure scallop spat that may be too small one one set should show up on the second set of bags...
Again, yesterday was the last day of the season for our spat bags, and surprisingly, we were still finding scallop spat, at 2-3 mm. On Wednesday we saw similar numbers of scallops... What does this mean? well it would seem that these scallops were spawned sometime in October... Scallop larvae usually spend around 2 weeks in the water column before settlement, and since these bags went out in October, it can be assumed that these scallops were spawned late September/early October, further evidence for fall spawning in bay scallops in NY waters... Is this related to warmer water temperatures later in the season? Perhaps, but I haven't investigated that avenue... It is just very exciting news for the scallop population, a seemingly steady spawn throughout the entire season, and even continued spawning through the fall... Yes, the number of spat on these last few collectors have not been as high as those during the summer, according to my professor, these are the highest numbers he's seen collected this late in the season over the course of the past few years... Further, in visual surveys, we are finding higher numbers of seed than ever before, although still much lower scallop densities than historic numbers.... Either way, its seems to be good news for the scallops, and good news for the countless people that have been working hard to restore bay scallop populations...