2016-Annual Town Report - Laserfiche WebLink

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Report of the Department of Natural Resources To the Honorable Board of Selectmen and the Citizens of the Town of Mashpee: The new Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was approved at the May 2016 Town Meeting, but did not become official until June 27th due to time for review by the Attorney General's office. Shellfish Constable Richard York was appointed Acting Director. Assistant Harbormaster Richard Santangelo was Acting Harbormaster until new Harbormaster Alec Turner was appointed July 25th. The move to the new DNR office in Town Hall took place on October 31 st. Implementation of the shellfish component of the Mashpee Comprehensive Watershed Nitrogen Management Plan (CWNMP) was scaled back for 2016 due to the delay in formation of the DNR which was not fully staffed. The order of 10 million quahog seed from the Aquacultural Research Corporation (ARC) hatchery was reduced to five (5) million. The full order of oyster seed was received. The quahog seed grew very well in the upwellers and trays at the Little River Town Dock. The 4.950 million quahog seed (2 mm size) grew up to an inch (25 mm) by fall with 4.555 planted (92 % survival). New shellfish seed upweller floats at the Town Dock were constructed with funds from the Cape Cod Commission in addition to Town appropriations. A total of 2,480 bags of oyster seed (1 mm size) set on pieces of sea clam shell (remote set) from the ARC hatchery were transported to trays in the Mashpee River. Barnstable County funded 480 of the bags. The seed grew very well in the river. A new project also a part of the CWNMP implementation was funded by an EPA Healthy Communities grant to the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's Natural Resources Department. The 2,000 bags of remote set oyster seed from the ARC hatchery were placed on shell beds in Shoestring Bay to restore oyster populations lost in the 1980s. The seed grew extremely fast due to blooms of algae that are the best foods for oysters. The bags were opened and the seed spread out on the shell bottom in the fall. Trapping of invasive green crabs reduced the number of shellfish predators in seed areas. In addition to the Town and Tribe Natural Resource Departments, AmeriCorps Cape Cod assisted with the projects. The DPW provided transportation of truckloads of seed bags from the hatchery. The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) started the first year of a 3 year study to quantify the effect of the shellfish component of the CWNMP on water quality including denitrification by microbes in the shellfish beds. Scallop season opened October 1 with only a few bushels harvested from Waquoit Bay and none elsewhere. That was about it for the season. This was an extreme decline from 2015 when 700 bushels were landed at the Seconsett Island causeway alone. The problem was that Falmouth and Mashpee did not release scallop seed for this year because it was not available from the hatcheries. This demonstrates that bay scallops are not self-sustaining and annual seeding is required. We should be able to get scallop seed next year. On October loth, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) made an emergency closure of shellfish harvesting in all waters of Mashpee and other towns due to an unprecedented bloom of potentially toxic algae occurring from Maine to Rhode Island. Scallop harvest was allowed for the muscle only. This was the first ever shellfishing closure in Mashpee due to harmful algae. DMF found blooms in Buzzard's Bay and Nantucket Sound. Some species of the algae named Pseudo-nitzschia produce domoic acid toxin that can cause amnesic shellfish poisoning of people eating shellfish that filter the algae from blooms (a characteristic symptom is permanent short term memory loss). We routinely identify and count algae under the microscope in our lab in water samples collected for the Mashpee Water Quality Monitoring Program (a collaboration of the Town, Tribe and SMAST), and had not seen this species before (even at low levels that would not be enough to make shellfish toxic). We conducted intensive monitoring during the closure and found Pseudo-nitzschia at low levels in Nantucket Sound, but not in the bays. No toxin was detected in quahogs collected from Mashpee and sent by the DMF to specialized labs. The bloom subsided by the end of October and the DMF opened the emergency closure areas for shellfish harvesting again on October 31 st. New technology is being developed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for continuous real-time monitoring of these blooms. The goal is to deploy sensors in Nantucket Sound and elsewhere. The management strategy for these blooms is to monitor for the algae, close areas for shellfish harvest when detected, and reopen the areas after the 121