Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the possibility of the September cohort of a bay scallop can reach to a commercial size and can avoid the biofouling and shell-boring impacts by overwintering cultivation. For these purposes, we compared the growth pattern of a bay scallop (Argopecten irradians) cultivated during the winter season from Nov. 2023 to March 2024 submerged in August and September, 2023 in Jaran Bay, the southern coast of Korea. There were significant differences in all biological parameters of scallops such as mean body weight, mean shell weight and mean wet meat weight between two cohorts submerged in August and September during winter season, but the September cohort could reached up to 80% of the commercial size in March and April. Thus the winter-spring landing of cultivated scallops could be a harvesting strategy by controlling the amount of landing through winter season and early spring not concentrating the single landing in late autumn for the conservation of the landing price of cultivated scallops.