Project goals and objectives: our broad objective for this study is to contribute to the body of knowledge needed to improve sea scallop stock assessment for the georges bank stock area and ensure…

Project goals and objectives: our broad objective for this study is to contribute to the body of knowledge needed to improve sea scallop stock assessment for the georges bank stock area and ensure sustainable management of this fishery in the face of changing oceanographic conditions. To do this, we will work cooperatively with the commercial fishing industry to accomplish the following goals: 1. Identify spawning seasonality through examination of gonads. 2. Explore the seasonality of relationships between scallop morphometrics and soft tissue weights. 3. Develop a conversion factor to allow comparisons between wet weights (typically collected in the federal survey) and dry weights (a standardized value that requires more time and effort to obtain and is not practical at sea). 4. Pilot an affordable industry-supported biological sampling program that could be expanded more broadly in the scallop fishery as well as transferred to other fisheries to support applied science and management with finer scale temporal data than are available through traditional sampling means. Work closely with nefsc to ensure resulting data is useful to management.