SCALLOPS
This is a short story I wrote to the science class of Oregon’s Jo Lane Middle School, where my Aunt Jane sometimes teaches. There are a couple of pictures in the media gallery to go along with the story.
I went diving for scallops with my dad recently and thought you might be interested in what it’s like, so here’s the inside story. I hope you enjoy it!
Scallops are bivalves, like clams, and they have a hard shell with two parts. The top half is flat, and the bottom is curved, sort of like a shallow bowl. The New Zealand scallops we caught can be many different blends of colors, including red, white, blue, yellow, pink, and brown, with a lot of unique patterns.
They’re pretty easy to catch, especially when you are scuba diving, as long as you can find a group of them. They live in sand at about 15 to 30 feet of water, and sometimes you have to search for a while before you find a good patch of scallops. You’ve also got to have good eyesight, because they lay on the sea bed, with the flat side of their shell up, almost entirely covered in sand. You can only really see a scallop-shaped outline on the bottom, but after I found one, I started noticing them everywhere! And once you find them, all you have to do is pick them up out of the sand and put them in your bag. If you let go of a scallop in mid-water, it will snap itself open and closed trying to get away from you, but they never get very far before they hit the bottom again! It’s actually a bit pathetic.J
When you find a scallop, you need to measure it to be sure it’s legal to keep. In New Zealand, the limit is 10 centimeters (4 inches) or larger. Another regulation you need to follow here is that you can only keep 20 scallops per person, or the coast guard can confiscate your boat!
When I’m done gathering scallops and taking a nice, hot shower, I need to clean my catch. To do this, I slide a knife inside the scallop and cut through the muscle, which is what you eat. That lets the shell open up so I can take the muscle out and cut away all the other parts. The round, white part inside the scallop is the muscle. Sometimes people also eat the orange part next to the muscle, but I don’t like it as much.
The only reason to clean a scallop is to eat it, and to eat it, you’ll probably want to cook it. They’re actually quite good straight from the shell, but that doesn’t appeal to everyone. We prepare scallops by breading them and pan-frying them with a little butter for two minutes on each side. Another way is to sauté them in butter and put them over pasta with cream sauce. Trust me, it’s delicious! Molly