NEWPORT NEWS — A scallop harvester from North Carolina is setting up shop in the city's Seafood Industrial Park, increasing the number of scallop operators in the city's harbor to five.
"We will have a record number of scallop operators here," said Doreen Kopacz, Newport News' port development administrator. The city owns the industrial park, and collects rent from businesses operating there.
Kopacz said with waterfront property in such high demand by developers along the East Coast, locations like Seafood Industrial Park become more valuable for the seafood industry.
"There are so many places (on the waterfront) where industrial uses are not welcomed," Kopacz said. "We're packed."
Meanwhile, the scallop business is lucrative, said Bill Mullis, owner of B&C Seafood, a scallop operator that's also located in Seafood Industrial Park. He said scallops are selling for record high prices. To prevent overfishing, the federal government limits the number of scallop permits.
What exactly is a scallop, anyway?
ReplyDeleteLike the true oysters (family Ostreidae), scallops have a central adductor muscle, and thus the inside of their shells has a characteristic central scar, marking the point of attachment for this muscle. The adductor muscle of scallops is larger and more developed than that of oysters, because they are active swimmers; scallops are in fact the only migratory bivalve. Their shell shape tends to be highly regular, recalling one archetypal form of a seashell, and because of this pleasing geometric shape, the scallop shell is a common decorative motif.
ReplyDeleteScallops have up to 100 simple eyes strung around the edges of their mantles like a string of beads. They are reflector eyes, about one mm in diameter, with a retina that is more complex than those of other bivalves. Their eyes contain two retina types, one responding to light and the other to abrupt darkness, such as the shadow of a nearby predator. They cannot resolve shapes, but can detect changing patterns of light and motion.[2][3]
Reflector eyes are an alternative to a lens where the inside of the eye is lined with mirrors which reflect the image to focus at a central point.[4] The nature of these eyes means that if one were to peer into the pupil of an eye, one would see the same image that the organism would see, reflected back out.[4] The scallop Pecten has up to 100 millimeter-scale reflector eyes fringing the edge of its shell. It detects moving objects as they pass successive lenses.