News reaches me that in Ireland this summer Mulroy Bay in Co Donegal had one of the best scallop spatfalls in the past decade. This bay is considered to be one of the best in Europe for the artificial spat collection of King scallop (Pecten maximus).
This is great news for Irish scallop farmers, such as Jerry Gallagher of North West Shellfish, who have been producing scallops by suspended culture in Mulroy Bay since the 1980s.
But despite a promising start to this venture, natural spatfalls became sporadic and often poor in Mulroy Bay, and this problem was blamed on the use of TBT antifouling on salmon cages during the 1980s.
