The Maine Department of Marine Resources will close several bays to scallop fishing this weekend, the first round of closures in the season this year.
Scallop fishing will be halted this Sunday in Cobscook Bay along with Whiting and Denny's Bay, Upper Machias and Little Machias Bays and Upper Western Bay.
Jeff Nichols, director of communications, said the process is a routine tool used to manage scallop populations.
"Based on the survey work that we've done, we've made a determination that continued fishing in those efforts would, in fact, deplete the resource to a point where it could not effectively recover," he said.
Nichols said the department has worked with fishermen to develop this process, which lets regulators respond in real time to fishing activity, instead of trying to predict it at the start of the season.
"We'll monitor the fishing effort, and we can determine how much of that resource is being removed from those areas," he said. "And so we make that call based on those observations and what we understand through the survey work."
Department staff survey the scallop populations throughout the year to ensure the sustainability of the species and the industry. For example, Nichols said surveys of Cobscook Bay started out with a lower amount of scallops compared to last season, and after five weeks of fishing there was a 44% decrease in scallop populations.
