Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Trace Kerr. And today is everything you never knew you wanted to know about scallop potting.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Potting, or potting potting.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Potting potting.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: I did not know. I wanted to know about that.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: And, no, that's not. It's not like taking a scallop and putting it in a pot of dirt and then growing a scallop plant. It's not that kind of. It's not. Not that kind of thing.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: It's too late. That's where my brain is. I'm like, is this like those little clams that tell you when the water sped and so they have to plant them? But, no, we're not going there. Okay.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: No, no. This is a. This is a chaz Kerr Instagram save special.
It was a picture of scallops, which we'll get into what those are in a second. You know, the clammy guys, and it said accidental discovery. Discovery. Scallops love disco.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: That makes me very happy.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: And I was like, accidental. How was that? Walk me through that accident. Did you drop a disco ball? Was there, you know, some music down in the deep? What. What even happened? Well, that was some newspaper person getting really excited about a paper.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Breaking news. Scallops love the bee gees.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Yeah. No, and the scientist is like, that's not really what we. Well, okay. At least they're talking about it. So, first off, when I looked up scallop, thinking, I'd give you some who, what, when, where of the life of a scallop. Google was like, oh, so you want to know how to sear them in a nice butter sauce?
[00:01:40] Speaker A: That's absolutely what's coming up here. So these are the little puck shaped ones that get nice brown and crispy on the top and bottom. Everybody. They look like if you put your thumb and forefinger together, that's an average size one, but they can come beefier.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Yes. So before they're that creamy white, marshmallow sized snack on a plate.
They're super cool. They have wide, very flat shells.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Pretty ones.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. If you've ever seen the little mermaid, those are bra shells. Those are probably scouts.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Yes. Okay.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: That's what she's got going on there. So those, they use those shells and some really powerful mussels, that thing that you like to eat, to swim.
So they. They kind of pull in water, and then they clap. They clap the shell. So if you see videos of them, they're laying on the sand because it's like they're they're kind of an open, sandy plane sort of thing, and then they go.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: And they just kind of, sort of look like they're flying, don't they?
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Yes, they do. Uh huh. Yeah, that's a scallop. And some other really cool things about the scallop along the edge of their body at the lip of the shell. It has eyes. About 200 of them.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Yes. Okay. We were just at the Seattle aquarium this week, and there was a really excited person reigning over some aquariums, and there were scallops, and she was showing us. Do you see the eyes? I'm like, no.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Tiny little spots.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Little blue bluish dots that are kind of along the edge. So it's watching you. And so when you and those eyes are great at doing two things, they can notice what?
[00:03:16] Speaker A: You'll lose me. Until I can say that their little eyes remind me of anytime a muppet was wearing a scarf, like doctor teeth. They have the. Just wafting. Okay, now we can get back to science.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: You know, if we didn't refer to the Muppets or.
Oh, shoot. We had something there for a while. It seems to come. Oh, Jurassic park.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: We don't mention Jurassic park or the Muppets. I mean, really, is this even brain? Check anyway.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: So the two things that they're really good at noticing are the shadow passing overhead. So it's going from being bright to dark. And then they're thinking that perhaps some peripheral vision that might give them some sort of vision.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: Oh, like they can actually see some shapes, not just a change in light.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Perhaps they're not. I mean, like, we don't. The brain of a scallop. How do we even. So they're not really certain about that. But whatever they perceive, scallop eyes are very sensitive to light. And I know you're thinking, but you said disco. You brought me in here with disco. Okay, calm down. Calm down. Okay. We're getting there. According to oceanconservancy.org, comma, sea scallops are one of the most valuable fisheries in the US. Like, 60 million pounds harvested in 2019.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Wow. Really?
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. That's like $570 million worth of little tiny white marshmallows on your plate drizzled with something green, right? Yeah.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Yeah, that's wild.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: So in order to get that many scallops, currently, the way we primarily get them is through dredging. So it's not great because. And I looked at a video of dredging. Imagine if you needed to cut your lawn and someone showed up with a backhoe and dug it up.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So anything else down there is being dislodged and shoved around and accidentally harvested, presumably.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: Well, accidentally harvested, or you're just, you know, you're destroying habitat because it's this sandy plain and you're just ripping it all up because you're harvesting scallops. And so maybe there's a different way to do it. But the way we figured out there was a different way to do it was a complete and total accident. And that's where the accident part comes in, from the newspaper Instagram article. So in 2019, this group called Fishtech Marine was trying to help crab, crab, crab fishermen. Crabbermen, crab, crab collectors, crabbers.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: There's crabmers. Could they be crabbers?
[00:05:48] Speaker B: We're gonna call them crabbers. The crabbiest crabbers. They were trying to help them increase their crab cake catch. And the way you catch crabs is you send down. It's kind of like, well, they call them a pot, but it's a frame, and then it's got, like, ropes braided around it so that water can pass through it. And there's usually a hole of some kind where the crab can go in but have a difficult time coming back out.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: It's the same idea as the bee trap.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yes. And so they said to this guy, this one fisherman, a cornish fisherman, hey, would you put a single pot light? And that's. Imagine it's a plastic thing barely big enough to hold the batteries inside it, and a little led light.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: And they're like, put this in your crab pot and lower that down. And some of them put lights in, some of them don't. And we'll check back in a month, and we'll see if it's made any difference, because some crabs are like, ooh, it's light in there. I want to go hang out. They're like you with the big light on the ceiling. So.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah, totally.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah. They get to the end of the month, and he's like, eh, didn't really make any difference with the crabs, but, man, I had more scallops in my pots.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Oh.
Oh, that's great.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: And they were like, wait, wait, what? And he said, well, usually he has about an average of five scallops caught per year in 35,000 pots.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Oh, it's very rare, then.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Unusual, because the scallop is, like, swimming. It's not. It's not going to be attracted to bait. It's got, you know, it'd have to go through a hole in the crab pot. You know, it's just yeah.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: It sees that crab pot and says, not today, buddy.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Yeah. But in the pots that had lights, he was getting ten per 50 pots.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Wow, that's quite an increase.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: 1400 percent increase or something crazy, right?
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: So they were like, hold on a second. Let's go talk to Exeter University and let's do a real study. So they took three months and they modified the traps. Okay, we're going to take existing stuff. So it was still like crab pots, but they modified them a little to make them more scallop entry friendly. They had little ramps in them so that when they swam in, it was.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: Harder for anything to purchase.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Yeah, kind of. And they had a huge increase.
Like, wow, you have pots with no lights. Nothing. Pots with lights. And I watched a video of the light in the pot, and you see this scallop kind of snap, snap, snap into frame into the trap. It bumps into the light and just boop. Drops into the trap.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: And it's so happy. It's like the pied piper, huh?
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. It looks like little Pac man's just into the light, so into its watery death. I know, it's like, oh, yeah. Oh, actually it's not. Sorry.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Thank you for your sacrifice, sir.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Good job. You will taste delicious. But what makes these two studies even cooler is where they were having the crab fellow, the cornish fellow, the first guy where he was doing his testing. Those areas aren't really known for scallop harvesting.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Oh, really? So, like, if they did this in a actual scallop rich environment, could go nuts.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Right. Okay. So like I said, in some cases, the light attracts more other catch, like snow crab or cod. So they're thinking, you know what? We could just add the lights to crab traps for people who are catching crab and have some lucky bycatch so that you'd also catch scallops.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: So I've caught crab, but I might have 24 to 25 scallops in each crab pot. So then I'm selling those and still making some money that way. It's a double dip.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Wow. From five a year to a couple dozen per pot.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: That's a crazy increase.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: It is a crazy increase. Although I was then I was thinking, okay, so it's ten per 50 pots in a place where there's not. So if you were in a location where it's like scallop town, and then you've got maybe pots that are designed even better with lights, maybe some disco balls, I don't know. But would you be able to do 60 million pounds that way?
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I was just wondering, like, can you upscale enough that it's. Because it seems like crabbing is much more boutique to put a pot down and collect the pot and.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. So you have to, like, cut back on the dredge a bit. And your scallop, you know, you just have it less. I don't know. It's an interesting. Hey, this is really cool. This is the thing that happens.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Can we upscale?
[00:10:29] Speaker B: I don't know. Yeah.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: So there wasn't actually any music, and so they might also just, like, techno raves.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: This is true.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Anything with that blinky light.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: I know. It's just. And it's not even blinking. It's just a white led. So I feel like, okay, news people, you wrote a headline. You clearly got me to. You got me to go. But this is what I don't like about some of these things, because I could just imagine somebody seeing that and they're like, oh, my God, they played disco. And here came the scallops. And it's like, no, there was no.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: There was no funky beachies. Sorry, Frank.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: I fell for the clickbait, just like the scallops fell for the light.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: But that was very interesting. That's a good clickbait. I'm okay with that one.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I guess if you'd led with scallops.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Like, light, that's a little bit more boring, right?
[00:11:15] Speaker B: I'm not interested.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: That's just an amazing. Even if, like, their family just eats better now because they're collecting more scallops, I bet you could sell them for more per pound in those areas because they're boutique and fancy.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. And it was kind of funny because when you watch. I was watching a video and before I had read this was crab pots and, oh, hey, we just happened to catch some scallops because they pull up this pot and it's got several crabs in it and two scallops. And I was like, this seems wildly inefficient.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. All right. If that's how you're gonna do it, because it is.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: It's an accident. Yeah. So that's scallop potting. That's what they call that. Wow.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Okay. That's. I do feel like that has some interesting future potential that could be better for our ocean floor, because I know that's a concern at times.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Well, I definitely didn't know I needed to know that about scallops, but I'm glad I do know.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And then I felt bad for every time I've enjoyed a scallop.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: Oh, scallop buddies. I may have tasted one of you and I did not enjoy it. You're safe from me.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Oh, okay.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: I grew up with lake trout, was my first fish exposure. And sorry, I just don't like fish things. And it's so much more costly and valuable that I feel bad every time someone's like, taste this lobster. It's amazing. I'm like, that $3 bite of lobster. It's gonna taste okay to me, but you're gonna really enjoy it. So you should just enjoy that $3 worth of lobster.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Instead of me.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: That's fair. That's like me and Brussels sprouts. No, thank you.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. I love a good toasted Brussels sprouts. My body does not. But my taste buds, too.
So if you'd like to share your food preferences with us, of course.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: Very good.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: You're probably gonna email us because this is the middle of age thing to do. I don't know. You younger people probably care too, and take pictures of it. So brainjunkpodcastmail.com or of course, always. We're on Facebook and Instagram as brainjunkpodcast. And if you've enjoyed this episode, you know, you can always ask your smart speaker to listen to us, or you can check out some of our back catalog on YouTube. We're everywhere, but not like, not like the government, but more in a fun, entertaining way.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: We're watching you all the time, but.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: We can't keep track of our own selves, so you're safe from us.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Anyway, we'll catch you next time. And we will.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Bye.
We will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know. And I guarantee you will not be bored. It.
