2008-Annual Town Report - Laserfiche WebLink

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use and fiscal ramifications for the Town, so we invite single (unattached) tiny oysters from the hatchery all residents to actively participate in its development placed trays in the Mashpee River. Another 50 oyster through our meetings and public hearings, by review- spat bags were placed in Hamblin Pond. By the fall, ing and commenting on the draft reports we generate more than a million oyster seed were growing in the and by any other means available. It took decades for trays. Most of the seed was funded by fees from our waterways to get into their current poor condition Mashpee shellfish permits, and some of the spat bags and it will probably take decades to clean them up,but were funded by the Massachusetts Division of Marine we are now at the point when we must decide how to Fisheries (DMF) through Barnstable County. do it. Your continued support for our work and par- ticipation in this decision making process will be sin- The DMF also funded 800,000 quahog seed cerely appreciated. grown in the propagation program. Scallop seed was purchased with funds from Mashpee shellfish permit Respectfully submitted, fees. The very small seed is grown in upweller tanks E Thomas Fudala, Chairman and then transferred to trays in the estuary to grow Matthew T. Berrelli, Vice Chairman larger for planting. Quahog seeding makes beds in Donald R. Desmarais, Clerk previously unproductive areas, and supplements the wild populations. Scallop seeding must be done every year to maintain the fishery, because the scallop pop- ulations do not sustain themselves in the wild now. Report of the This was another poor season with only about 10 !' Shellfish Constable bushels of scallops harvested in Waquoit Bay from October through December 2008. The scallop seed released in the fall of 2007 was small because of lack To the Honorable Board of Selectmen and the of food. The water was unusually clear. Smaller seed Citizens of the Town of Mashpee: suffers higher losses from predation. Next year might be better because we got more seed and it grew larger The Mashpee Shellfish Constable, and all shell- (There was more phytoplankton food this year). The fish related functions and programs were transferred members of AmeriCorps Cape Cod put in many hours to the Police Department when the Shellfish working on the propagation program. AmeriCorps Department was eliminated during Town government members Jennifer Burkhardt and Sanjoy Paul put in reorganization in 2008. The move increased effi- many more hours working on the propagation and ciency and worked out well. water quality programs as individual placements with the Shellfish Constable. Approximately 520,000 oysters from the Enforcement, resource management and shell- project were harvested from January through March Mashpee oyster aquaculture/eutrophication mitigation fishpropagation ropagation resulted in an abundance of quahogs and December 2008. This removed about 260 kilo- again this year. The wild soft-shell clam populations grams(kg) of nitrogen from the estuary based on lab- have not recovered from the precipitous decline in oratory analysis of the nitrogen content of our oysters. 2006, but more seed has set in some areas. The harvest was 2.6 times more than the previous year The Mashpee water quality monitoring program and half way to the goal of a million oysters a year. In the spring of 2008, some of the oyster seed started in was upgraded with new laboratory facilities at the 2007 was removed from the trays in the Mashpee Police Department. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe River and spread out along the shoreline of Mashpee started a new water quality monitoring program in col- Neck from the mouth of the Mashpee River to the laboration with Towns program. The tribe received Town Landing to make oyster beds. By December, federal funding for 2 new state-of-the-art automatic they were ready for harvest. The popularity of oyster- water quality monitoring units, and lab analyses of ing is reflected in the increased numbers of shellfish samples from Popponesset and Waquoit Bay. One of Permits issued. The massive fish kill in the Mashpee the monitoring units will be deployed in Popponesset ! Bay and the other in Santuit Pond. Blooms of blue- River that occurred in the summer of 2005 because of ogreen algae have become a problem in Santuit Pond. oxygen depletion from a thick algae bloom growing on excess nutrients has not been repeated since we In addition to Mashpee volunteers, other collaborators have been growing large numbers of oysters in the for monitoring include the Cotuit Waders, the river. Oysters filter out algae for food. Seeding was Mashpee Environmental Coalition, SMAST increased in 2008 with 800 oyster spat bags (oyster (University Massachusetts Dartmouth), and the seed set on pieces of shell in mesh bags), and million Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. 159