Shellfish – Scallops
This page, clockwise from top left: Jane Grant inspects a tray of juvenile scallops; Philip Grant lowers a longline; the juvenile scallops need to be spread thinly to allow them room to grow
Far page: Jane and Philip Grant holding a lantern – an alternative way of hanging scallops from a longline
scallops or oysters. People can creel on it but there can be no mobile gear on it, and no-one can dive on it. ‘My Several Order extends for about 25 hectares,’ explains Jane. ‘You don’t buy them, or lease them, rather you’re given rights to them for a certain amount of time. ‘Several Orders aren’t as controversial now as they were then,’ she
adds. ‘I had a lot of opposition from local fi shermen. This was before fi sh farming had really kicked off. They thought that if they let me have one then the whole of the north of Scotland would be covered in them, which never happened of course.’ The location of the Several Order is important. ‘You have to make sure it
is on rough ground,’ explains Jane. ‘If it’s in a spot where someone can put a dredger in, guaranteed somebody will, at some point, do exactly that in the middle of the night. We’re lucky because our Several Order is right outside the house.’
A scallop farm also needs scallop spat. This wasn’t an issue when Jane fi rst started up. ‘I built up the farm until we were producing about 100,000 shells a year,’ she recalls. ‘It’s not a huge amount, but when you
‘The big, old scallops aren’t there anymore. The only solution to the problem is aquaculture’
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consider that we were selling them at around 80 pence a shell, it wasn’t a bad income at all. If I’d been able to continue the ranch at
that sort of size, things would have been fi ne.’ However, after ten years Jane had to give up scallop ranching altogether. ‘Each
year there were less and less spat until there were hardly any. And it wasn’t just here. Historically, I always said that in Raasay Sound you could put a spat bag outside your back door and collect all the spat you needed for a year.’ The reason for the disappearance of the spat is something of a mystery.
One theory is that algal blooms are to blame. ‘There was one red tide in the early 2000s,’ recalls Jane. ‘Algal blooms are not usually toxic to scallops, but this one was. It killed a lot of the salmon in the farms as well. The following year there were no spat. Everything else recovered – there are plenty of queenie spat and other species like starfi sh and crabs.’ Jane’s own view is that it has more to do with a lack of biomass. ‘The king scallop population is getting to a critical stage,’ she says. ‘In places like Orkney, for example, the big, old scallops aren’t there anymore. They are now relying on scallops that are fi ve years old instead of fi fteen – so spat isn’t being produced in the same numbers as before. The only solu- tion to this problem is aquaculture.’ In 2012 Jane was approached by Grant Campbell, a professional scallop diver
from Ullapool, who runs a small processing plant in France with his wife. He asked her to come into his business, Scot-Hatch, which was established in 2010. Last year they got around the problem of a lack of king scallop spat by sending their mature scallops to Norway for spawning. There, a company called Scalpro AS has perfected a hatchery technique that enables them to produce scallops on a commercial scale – in 2011,
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