When was the last time you tried a new food? Something you’ve never tasted before. That’s what Captain Jack Morris was doing when I approached him in a buffet line at a Fisheries Innovation and Technology Expo at Moby Dick Brewing Co., in New Bedford. I asked him what he was trying.
"The squid," he said. "I’m kinda working my way around. But no, it’s good. Excellent, really."
The squid Morris was tasting is not the kind you’d find at your favorite fishmonger or offered up as calamari at a local restaurant. At least not yet. Morris was trying out various preparations of neon flying squid, including a calamari dish.
"The fried squid, I’m gonna grab a couple of them," he said. "I’m sure they’re good too."
And they were. Neon flying squid tastes like the squid we’re used to being served, but they’re a much bigger animal that lives out in the deep ocean.
The expo was put on by the Coonamessett Farm Foundation, a research organization based in East Falmouth. CFF scientists believe neon flying squid can be a profitable new catch for scallop fishermen, whose boats are sitting idle much of the year due to strict scalloping regulations. The foundation is also trying to create a market for species that prey on bivalves – especially scallops, which have dwindled in numbers. The top of their list is the moon snail, which is a common bycatch in existing fisheries.
Ron Smolowitz is founder and a current board member of the foundation. He said by developing a market and fishery for predators, they hope to help the scallops rebound.
"Moon snails, sea stars and crabs are major predators of scallops. And their abundance has exploded," he said. "And because there’s no fishery on them, there’s no control. So the ecosystem is out of whack."
While we were talking, Smolowitz was sampling neon flying squid ceviche.
"Oh, this is really good," he said. "This is the future of New England."
Moon snails were also on the menu. They can grow as big as a softball inside their moon-colored shells, and they can be quite chewy. At Moby Dick, the chef incorporated them into a tasty Bohemian chowder, along with bacon, celery, onion and carrots.
Andrew Corso is a CFF research biologist working on developing a moon snail fishery.
"You have this predator that's eating lots of commercial bivalves like clams, mussels, potentially scallops," Corso said. "And [it's] something that's easily caught. So it's really just kind of connecting the dots and figuring out, is anyone interested in actually consuming this?"
To answer that question, Corso is putting moon snails in the hands of local chefs, to see if they can create a market demand. He’s also working with fish processors to identify ways to tenderize the snails.
He explained, "In these types of downturns in profitability through sea scallops, I think that there's a real drive from the fishery to try and come up with ways to capitalize on whether it's bycatch like a moon snail or making an investment into something like neon flying squid to try to expand what they're able to fish for.”
With neon flying squid, creating a market isn’t the biggest challenge. In fact, CFF has already identified a buyer — in Hokkaido, Japan, where the market already exists.
Ryan Munnelly is the research biologist in charge of CFF’s neon flying squid project.
"Establishing a fishery would depend on export and to get that higher value," Munnelly said. "Squid aren't perceived as a high market item currently in the U.S. So, we wouldn't want to go through all this effort to, you know, be getting 50 cents to a dollar a pound for these like other squid species.”
But Munnelly says a Japanese processor has offered to pay $4.60 per pound for high quality neon flying squid.
The bigger challenges for this fishery are the up-front investment in specialized fishing equipment and having to go much farther offshore to find the catch, as Munnelly explained.
"For our exploratory trip, we fished off-shelf between 600 and 3,000 meters deep, well beyond where even the captain that we were working with had ever been," he said.
Going after the neon flying squid also means rigging boats with specialized machinery, lights, and a parachute sea anchor to hold the boat in place. It’s a significant investment and Munnelly said they’re hoping the project can attract some public funding.
"Even relative to other fisheries, you know re-rigging your vessels, this is a really particularly large investment with a potentially equal or larger return for the State, having the Port of New Bedford and having all these large vessels that are now going to be potentially idle," he said.
And, about that name …
Munnelly explained, "They’re called flying squid because they do breach the surface, like a flying fish, to escape predators."
Munnelly said neon flying squid can turn several colors, although not any you’d typically think of as neon. But they do have an orange stripe down the middle that comes and goes.
