Next time you're heading over the causeway to Orient, take a look to your right. You'll see perhaps the biggest, most successful scallop sanctuary in the world -- the result of five years of work by team members from Cornell Cooperative Extension and Long Island University.

"We just learned that the commercial landings [for scallops] in November and December of last year represent the highest level in the Peconics since 1995," said Chris Smith, marine program director at Cornell Cooperative Extension. "The stocks are now over 13 times what they were when this project started."

Mr. Smith said more than 500,000 Peconic Bay scallops live in 2,500 lantern nets underwater, suspended from a longline system at the four-acre site in Orient Harbor. The scallops are about a year old and are tucked away in the harbor, protected from predators.

A few thousand have been released periodically into the wild when they were mature enough, which has helped to repopulate the delectable bay scallop in the waters of the Peconics, Mr. Smith said.

But he added that the team still has "a ways to go" before fully correcting the damage brown tide inflicted upon bay scallops up until the mid-1990s.

"Our ultimate goal is to increase the likelihood that these resources will become self-sustainable and contribute to the health of the local ecosystems as well as the economic health of the local communities," Mr. Smith said.

He also noted that the project will create and help maintain existing jobs, increase fishery landings during the November-through-March season and "contribute to the economic viability of Long Island's historically important fishing industry."

Five years ago, Mr. Smith's team got $2 million in funding from Suffolk County. Scallop numbers have increased steadily since then, but the past two years have seen marked growth, said Mr. Smith.

"It appears that our landmark program to revitalize the shellfishing industry is beginning to work," Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said in a statement.

Mr. Smith and company are looking to gain more federal stimulus funding to build on the already-successful effort. Early last month, he asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for another $2 million to nurture 500,000 scallops in Flanders and Hog Neck bays -- "historically important scalloping areas," Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Levy, Congressman Tim Bishop and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer have voiced their support for this funding. Southold Town Baymen Association member Peter Wenczel told Mr. Smith that he supported the project.

"In years without a bay scallop crop, many of us end up falling behind," he wrote in a letter to Mr. Smith. "The resurgence of a consistent bay scallop crop has long been recognized as the only way that baymen will be able to survive in the long term and have a positive economic impact on their communities."

In July and August, workers will restock the Orient Harbor nets with juvenile scallops grown in an elaborate hatchery on Cedar Beach in Southold.

And it's in the Southold facility where a biologist named Michael Patricio creates high-octane food for the baby scallops, as he has for the past 12 years.

Mr. Patricio, resembling a mad scientist in a hooded sweatshirt, is the brains behind the project, maintaining several huge bubbling vats of algae. He "grows" two different flavors -- brown and green -- both of which, he said, are mighty tasty to the little shellfish.

"We enable the algae to grow to its highest density possible," he said.

The food is piped from the bubbling vats into the waters where the young scallops grow up around Cedar Beach, and they are continuously fed. Mr. Patricio said that this system of feeding the scallops originated in England about 20 years ago, and Cornell Cooperative Extension is one of only a few facilities that use it in the U.S.

In spawning tanks at the Cedar Beach facility, ideal spawning temperatures, which in nature scallops experience for only a few months, are re-created all the time, so no egg is ever left behind.

"Here in the hatchery, we're able to fertilize 100 percent of the eggs," Mr. Patricio said.

When a portion of the mature scallops is released into the wild, Mr. Smith said "it's like watching your kids go off to college."

"It's out of our hands then," he said. "You hope they survive."

Because of the existing high density of scallops in places like Hog Neck Bay, Mr. Smith said that if the team can boost that density even higher, then the scallops have a better chance of becoming self-supporting.

But the team needs more money to place more scallops and plant more eelgrass -- the underwater vegetation that protects shellfish in nature -- in a bigger scallop sanctuary.

It's hard labor keeping those scallop nets clean -- meet the men of "the dirtiest catch," working the boat on Orient Harbor in next week's Suffolk Times.

eschultz@timesreview.com

Did you know?

* The largest bay scallop spawner sanctuary in the world lies just beyond the causeway in Orient Harbor at a four-acre site

* 2,500 nets contain over 500,000 scallops

* It takes about two months for baby scallops to grow in the Cedar Beach hatchery

* Commercial landings for scallops last November and December represent the highest level in the Peconics since 1995

* Scallop stocks in local waters are now over 13 times what they were five years ago

Source: Chris Smith, marine program director at Cornell Cooperative Extension