It is informed that Caraquet Bay’s first bay scallop farmer Michel Poitras, of Aquaculture Chaleur Inc., started raising the foreign mollusques last year on his six-hectare oyster farm. Bay scallops used to be of less important to the province’s aquaculture industry mainly because there hasn’t been a commercial hatchery that breeds them.
It is said that the scene is changed in Shippagan when fisheries company, L’Étang Ruisseau Bar Ltd. opens New Brunswick’s first commercial shellfish hatchery. Hatchery owner, André Mallet said of bay scallops told that it will be a nice secondary product to the oyster. Bay scallops were actually introduced to Nova Scotia and P.E.I. in the late 1980s, and to the Gulf of St. Lawrence a few years later.
Caraquet Bay’s first bay scallop farmer Michel Poitras opined that they certainly generate revenue to compliment the oyster side of things. He wasn’t always such a blatant bay-scallop enthusiast. When he first contemplated raising them a few years ago, he said he worried about the effect they’d have on local species.
Department of Fisheries and Oceans biologist Thomas Landry and others shellfish researchers monitored the health of bay scallops to determine whether or not they carried dangerous diseases or would be invasive to native species. Landry also makes the point that adding shellfish to Maritime coastal areas is increasingly important for the health of our ocean.
