Bay Scallops in Tampa Bay

Bay scallops are present in Tampa Bay but not yet abundant, and the Tampa Bay Estuary Program treats a sustainable population as a goal still to be reached.

The Tampa Bay Estuary Program lists achieving a sustainable scallop population in Tampa Bay as one priority action under its Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan, and says that before this can happen an assessment of the status and trends of the current population must occur. TBEP describes scallops as a key indicator of bay health because they require clear, salty water and robust seagrass habitat, and notes that as filter feeders they remove algae and organic matter from the water and, during red tide, take up algae cells and store toxins in their gut.

Seagrass is the habitat that limits them, and its recent record is mixed. The Southwest Florida Water Management District reported at its July 9, 2025 Springs Coast Management Committee meeting that Tampa Bay held 31,562 acres of seagrass in its 2024 mapping, up 1,427 acres, or 5 percent, from 30,135 acres in 2022. The district notes that its maps are drawn from imagery flown from December to February and represent conditions before the 2024 hurricane season.

The Great Bay Scallop Search is an annual Tampa Bay Watch snorkel survey, held since 1993, in which volunteers count scallops in lower Tampa Bay seagrass beds.

Tampa Bay Watch runs the search in partnership with the Tampa Bay Estuary Program and Pinellas County Environmental Management. Its 2026 page lists the search areas as Middle and Lower Tampa Bay, Boca Ciega Bay, Emerson Point Preserve and the Dunedin Causeway, with volunteers assembling at the Fort De Soto Park boat ramp in Tierra Verde, the Grandview Park boat ramp in St. Petersburg, Emerson Point Preserve in Palmetto and the Dunedin Causeway. The 2026 search ran on Saturday, August 1, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., starting with a captain's meeting at 9 a.m., and every registration slot was marked full.

TBEP explains what the count is for. Its bay scallops page describes the search as a community event in which boaters search areas in lower Tampa Bay where scallops are likely to be found, and calls the data a valuable source for tracking abundance. TBEP built a scallop search dashboard to show results for each year and a summary of trends, and uses it in reporting scallop abundance against its management plan goals.

The launch sites show where the count happens. Tampa Bay Watch thanks the City of St. Petersburg, Pinellas County and Manatee County for providing the space for the 2026 events, so the search is a lower Tampa Bay survey rather than one along the Hillsborough County shore near downtown Tampa.

Tampa Bay Watch reports a record of 674 scallops in 2009 and a count of 38 in the 31st search on August 1, 2026.

Tampa Bay Watch states that search results vary each year with water quality, red tide, rainfall and storms, and that the record high was set in 2009 with 674 scallops found. Its scoreboard for the 31st Annual Great Bay Scallop Search on August 1, 2026 reads 38 scallops found, from volunteers working at three major locations.

A count of 38 against a record of 674 shows scallops still present in Tampa Bay but far from established, which is the gap TBEP's management plan goal is meant to close. Year to year totals are best read as an indicator of conditions in the lower bay that summer, since Tampa Bay Watch ties the swings to red tide, rain and storms.

Florida bay scallops live in shallow, nearshore Gulf waters from Pensacola to the Florida Keys, usually in seagrass beds, which puts lower Tampa Bay inside their range.

The FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute describes the bay scallops found in Tampa Bay and along the rest of the coast (Argopecten irradians) as living in shallow, nearshore waters along Florida's Gulf coast, from Pensacola to the Florida Keys, usually nestled in seagrass beds and easy to tell from other bottom dwellers by their electric blue eyes. They can swim by opening and closing their shells rapidly to generate thrust.

That dependence on seagrass is why the SWFWMD acreage figures above matter to Tampa Bay scallops: the 2024 Tampa Bay figure was 1,427 acres above the 30,135 acres mapped in 2022, and the counts the volunteers make each August are taken over those same lower bay grass flats.

Yes: FWC researchers added Tampa Bay to a scallop restoration project from 2002 to 2005, and a NOAA-funded pilot later released hatchery larvae and juveniles near Tierra Verde.

The FWRI past restoration projects page states that after a 1997 to 2002 project between the Anclote River and Crystal River, a 2002 to 2005 project continued that work while adding restoration efforts in Tampa and Sarasota bays. Researchers used juvenile bay scallops raised by a University of South Florida hatchery or by Bay Shellfish Co., planted them in wire cages anchored to the seafloor and monitored them monthly. Because of the labor and cost of cages, FWRI shifted to larval releases, and since 2005 restoration programs have relied on an aquaculture facility in Palmetto to raise scallops to the pediveliger stage, ready to settle on seagrass blades within 10 to 14 days.

The NOAA Restoration Center project database lists the Tampa Bay Scallop Restoration Strategy, a completed project near Tierra Verde in Pinellas County with a 2010 construction start, that released larvae at three size classes to find the best release size. The project was unable to achieve sufficient results to assess the methods, but NOAA records that it pointed to the need for more frequent assessments of adult populations.

No: FWC's 2026 bay scallop page lists harvest zones only from Bay County to the Anclote Key Lighthouse, north of Tampa Bay.

The FWC bay scallop regulations page states that bay scallops may only be harvested in state waters from its listed zones. The southernmost, the Pasco Zone, covers state waters south of the Hernando and Pasco county line and north of Anclote Key Lighthouse in northern Pinellas County. Tampa Bay, Boca Ciega Bay and the Hillsborough County shoreline lie south of that line, so the scallops counted in the Great Bay Scallop Search are not open to harvest.

The 2026 seasons north of Tampa Bay were unusually restricted, and all had ended by October. FWC closed the St. Joseph Bay and Gulf County zone for the whole 2026 season after a summer FWRI survey found very low scallop abundance, and closed the Pasco Zone effective August 6, 2026, after detecting the algae Pyrodinium bahamense above National Shellfish Sanitation Program thresholds.

Where harvest is open north of Tampa Bay, FWC sets the daily bag limit in the Gulf through northwestern Taylor County and Levy through Pasco County zones at 2 gallons of whole bay scallops in shell or 1 pint of meat per person, and a maximum of 10 gallons whole or half a gallon of meat per vessel.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the FWC bay scallop regulations, FWRI bay scallop and past projects pages, the NOAA Restoration Center project record, the SWFWMD 2024 seagrass presentation, the TBEP bay scallops page and Tampa Bay Watch's 2026 search page.