processors' output. And, an 

 aggressive entrepreneur, retired 

 from the North Carolina pulpwood 

 industry, made inroads into the 

 world scallop market. 



But the main reason was the 

 calico scallop itself. Prolific and 

 fast-growing, the calico can grow 

 to commercial size in six months. 

 It spawns year-round, and in- 



dividual calicoes can release more 

 than a million eggs and 25 billion 

 sperm cells in one spawn. It 

 matures and dies in about two 

 years, sometimes disappearing 

 almost overnight. Its limits are 

 still unknown. 



So when the calico showed up in 

 force off Florida last year, the 

 seafood industry mobilized like 



never before. Fishermen hustled 

 to catch as many loads as they 

 could before the scallops disap- 

 peared or died. Even an unpleas- 

 ant bout with parasitic nematodes 

 failed to spoil the fun. 



This month, Coastwatch looks at 

 the calico scallop fishery, and 

 some of the North Carolinians who 

 have helped to build it. 



Machines haven't quite replaced hand-shuckers 



In a back room at Homer Smith 

 Seafood in Salter Path, Hancy 

 Marshall shucks scallops by hand, 

 turning out about five gallons of the 

 sweet-tasting mollusks a day. But in 

 the front room of the processing plant, 

 things are mechanized. Scallops ride 

 conveyor belts from steam box to 

 packing table. Depending on the size, 

 150 to 500 gallons of scallop meats may 

 roll off the conveyor belt each day. 



Homer Smith Seafood contrasts the 

 old and the new. The old, hand shuck- 

 ing has been around for years. 

 Marshall says she's shucked scallops 

 since she was 15 years old — some 37 

 years. Today she's turning out bay 

 scallops her son harvested along the 

 North Carolina coast. 



Marshall stands by a concrete tray 

 and plucks a bay scallop from a 

 massive pile of the bivalve mollusks 

 heaped there. With a scallop cupped in 

 her left hand, Marshall pries open the 

 shell with a quick twist of her knife. 

 Discarding the top shell, Marshall 

 scoops the viscera out of the bottom 

 shell and scrapes the adductor muscle, 

 the part that is eaten, into a paper cup. 

 As the paper cup fills, she empties it 

 into a plastic gallon bucket. 



Marshall says she learned to shuck 

 scallops by watching others. She 

 shucks scallops from December 

 through May. During the summer 

 Marshall works in Homer Smith's fish 

 market. 



According to John Maiolo, an East 

 Carolina University sociologist and 

 UNC Sea Grant researcher, most of 

 North Carolina's hand shuckers are 

 women. For many, shucking supple- 

 ments their families' incomes. 



Hand shuckers usually combine 

 shucking with other seasonal process- 

 ing activities such as heading shrimp, 



picking crabs, filleting fish and shuck- 

 ing oysters and clams. A fast hand 

 shucker can earn $50 a day. An 

 average shucker will earn about $1000 

 a season, Maiolo says. 



Today most hand shuckers turn out 

 only bay scallops harvested from 

 North Carolina estuaries. Mike Fiorini 

 of Homer Smith Seafood says 

 processors don't run the bay scallops 

 on the machines because the freshly 

 caught bays don't open as readily as 

 calicoes in the steam box. Processors 

 retrieve more meat if the scallops are 

 hand shucked. 



Also fishermen prefer that their bay 

 scallops are hand shucked, Fiorini 

 says. The machines are not 100 percent 

 efficient, so some of the meat is lost. 

 For a fisherman being paid per gallon 

 shucked, every piece of meat means 



Photo by Neil Caudle 



more money in his pocket. 



While the hand shucker may be ef- 

 ficient, you can't beat the mechanical 

 shucking machines when it comes to 

 processing the thousands of pounds of 

 calicoes trucked into Carteret County 

 each day. The mechanical shucking 

 machine has been around for almost 30 

 years, Maiolo says. Elmer Willis 

 claimed to have developed the first 

 mechanical shucker in Carteret 

 County. Willis received the first pa- 

 tent on the machine, but others con- 

 tested his claim to the invention. 



Sam Thomas, Sea Grant's seafood 

 specialist with the NCSU Seafood 

 Laboratory in Morehead City, says 

 mechanical shucking equipment was a 

 combination and adaptation of 

 machines already in use in food 

 technology. The eviscerator, for exam- 



Hancy Marshall shucks bay scallops by hand 



