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ELLSWORTH — This
summer’s spread of red tide that halted
shellfish harvesting along Maine’s coast is as
bad as anyone can recall.
“I’ve never seen
it this bad,” said Chip Davison, president of
The Great Eastern Mussel Farms in Tenants
Harbor.
His company is
one of the larger suppliers of Maine mussels in
the state, and he’s been in the business for 26
years.
Like fishermen
who live with the vagaries of Maine weather,
Davison has learned there’s no gain in getting
mad at nature’s course nor a stretch of bad
luck. The red tide closures just keep pinching
the mussel harvesters tighter as more of the
territory they drag is temporarily called off
limits. While he doesn’t take it personally,
Davison sounded a bit discouraged as he said the
red tide seems to be hitting the spots where
he’s got harvesters at work.
“It’s just
luck,” he said Monday. “There’s nothing you can
do about it.”
“It’s
unbelievable,” said Blue Hill seafood dealer
Robert Bauer, who recently spent weeks working
out a place to land mussels in Bath from some
mussel beds off Phippsburg.
After striking a
deal with a property owner, and building and
installing a hoist, Bauer said he got only a
week of use out of it before the red tide
closure shut down harvesting in that area.
While neither of
them can do anything about their luck, Bauer and
Davison praise the efforts of the Department of
Marine Resources scientists who monitor
shellfish health and implement the closures.
“The fact that
they have this long list of closures is because
they have places that are open,” Davison said.
Undoubtedly, it would be easier administratively
to close down the entire coast until all danger
has past. But that would mean even harder times
for fishermen relying on the resources. So while
the closures can mean less work for mussel and
clam harvesters, trying to keep open areas that
are safe creates more work than Jay McGowan
wanted.
A biologist for
the Department of Marine Resources, McGowan
monitors levels of algae, known as red tide, as
it builds up in filter feeding shellfish along
the coast.
He has been
working straight time since last fall when a
particularly intense bloom of the algae set in
along the coast late in the season. McGowan was
worried then that the water temperature might
drop and quahogs would go into their nearly
dormant winter mode during which they purge the
algae accumulated in their bodies.
That’s just what
happened, and McGowan worked through the winter
to try and open up as much area as he could for
the quahog draggers. Just as things started to
clear up in the spring, new traces of the algae
that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning
started showing up in harmful levels in late
April and May.
Since then, he’s
been testing continually, taking samples from
the outer islands and ends of peninsulas where
algae coming in from the Bay of Fundy tends to
first show up.
McGowan
described the algae bloom off the coast as a
front that runs from Isle au Haut all up into
Canadian waters off New Brunswick.
Along that front
there are bulges where it has pushed inshore.
That’s where closures have to be made.
Just last
Friday, McGowan’s tests from sites on the
Schoodic Peninsula Dyer Neck showed levels had
spiked and contamination had started in Pigeon
Hill Bay. However, Harrington River and Bay
remained clear of red tide and open for
harvesting.
Other closures
most relevant to Hancock County include the
soft-shell clam closures around Isle au Haut,
Mount Desert Island and Swan’s Island.
There are mussel
and carnivorous snail closures from Great Head,
Bar Harbor to Steuben; from Dodge Point to Great
Head on Mount Desert Island and around Isle au
Haut, Marshall and Swan’s islands.
McGowan said
some of the algae levels are as high as those of
last fall. And while he hasn’t had the
opportunity to go back and look at data, he said
it looks as though the red tide of last year is
reinforcing this summer’s outbreak.
He said algae
could leave cysts on the bottom when colder
water overtakes it in the fall. Those cysts then
send out new algae in the spring when the water
warms again.
Bauer said he
believes this summer’s weather is contributing
to the problem.
“It’s that
easterly wind that kills us,” he said. While
that flow does tend to make for foggy
conditions, it also sets the water from the Bay
of Fundy in on the coast of Maine. Bauer said
the normal southwesterly flow tends to break up
the bloom in the bay and drive it away from the
Maine coast.
“My belief is
that southwest [winds] tends to keep it
offshore,” McGowan said. However, any wind with
an easterly component allows the bloom to come
ashore in Maine. He said one of the factors he
saw contributing to last fall’s high red tide
levels was the offshore passage of Hurricane
Juan.
He recalled
somewhat longingly the 2002 season when only a
few areas of toxicity showed up on the outer
islands all summer. “I know this is really
hurting the shellfish industry,” he said.
So while McGowan
is concentrating on testing in open harvest
areas in order to keep them open, he said he is
going back to closed areas to get samples that
can tell him whether levels are dropping.
Once he knows
the shellfish are purging the algae, McGowan can
go in and test more intensively with an eye to
reopening any areas that are safe. |
