STONINGTON – When a fishery is in trouble, the source of the problem is often identified as “too many fishermen.”

For Stonington lobsterman Marsden Brewer and a growing number of Maine fishermen, however, the recent decline in the scallop fishery has more to do with the shellfish than the fishermen.

“We look at it as there’s not enough fish,” Brewer said Sunday as he headed his boat out of Stonington harbor toward Isle Au Haut Bay. “So we’re trying to provide more fish.”

It was a fine day for fishing, with clear skies overhead and a light breeze blowing across almost calm waters. Gentle waves broke on the granite shores that lined the route out of Stonington Harbor toward Isle au Haut.

But Sunday was not a day for harvesting for Brewer and his small crew. It was a day for sowing seed scallops.

Brewer and about 100 fishermen along the coast of Maine are participating in the Wild Scallop Enhancement Project, using techniques imported from Japan in an effort to rejuvenate a sagging scallop industry. The effort, which is now in its third year, could help restore the inshore stocks of scallops and reduce local dependence on the lobster fishery.

Last weekend, Brewer, his wife, Donna, and fellow lobsterman Larry Spencer seeded an estimated 125,000 young scallops onto scallop grounds between Stonington Harbor and Isle au Haut. That’s just a portion of the more than 2 million young scallops local fisherman will set this year in and around Penobscot Bay. Similar projects also are under way in Saco Bay and in Cobscook Bay.

The project grew out of a state-sponsored visit three years ago by state fisheries officials and others to Maine’s sister state in Japan, according to Scott Feindel, a Department of Marine Resources research scientist. They brought back the techniques that Japanese fishermen have been using for about 20 years.

The process has turned the scallop fishery in Japan into an enormously successful industry, spawning a scallop aquaculture industry and broadening the market for scallops in Japan.

“Their scallop production has gone through the roof,” Feindel said recently.

The local project is exciting because of the cooperation that has gone into it, he said. A number of associations and organizations have been involved along with the University of Maine, the DMR and the fishermen. Although the idea came through the state, the fishermen have been the ones who have jumped on it and made it work.

“This is really a fisherman-initiated project; we’re really in a support role,” Feindel said. “That’s helped to foster some trust between the scientists and the fishermen.”

Brewer stresses that the virtue of the project is that it is not a program.

“This is not a management program,” the lobsterman said. “We’re not running back and forth to Augusta with a lot of new laws. This is stewardship, plain and simple. It’s all about responsible stewardship.”

And it’s voluntary. The state, using a grant from the Northeast Consortium, a group of New England research institutions, which organized to encourage cooperative fisheries projects in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, provides the gear at no cost. The fishermen, looking to their future, provide their lines, their boats and their time.

“They do it because it makes sense,” Brewer said. “They know we’re in a mess here. I used to go ground fishing. Most of the lobstermen in town used to go ground fishing. Now we’re all packed into one corner.”

A revitalized scallop fishery could provide the way out.

The scallop enhancement project is not glamorous, but it has the simplicity of an idea that just might work.

Normally, adult female scallops spawn around mid-August and the eggs are fertilized in the water. Scallop larvae drift in the water column for about 38-40 days. As they develop, the young scallops sink and attach themselves to the ocean bottom.

In the wild, they are subject to heavy predation, mainly from starfish and crabs. The idea behind the project is to capture the young scallops when they are most vulnerable and rear them in relative safety until they are large enough to stand a better chance of survival.

The gear consists of “spat bags,” each one a fine-mesh bag that is stuffed with a wider-mesh collection material called netron. The bags are suspended in the water from an anchored buoy. Scallop larvae floating freely in the water can fit through the mesh of the orange spat bags and land on the netron, but, as they grow, they become too big to get out.

“This all started with one old Japanese fisherman,” Brewer said. “He took an onion bag with some cedar brush in it and set it out. This really started from the ground up.”

Last September, individual fishermen set out spat bags in areas they had identified as good collection areas, and for the last 10 months, the young scallops have been growing, generally safe from predators. The bags the fishermen hauled on Sunday were filled with scallops, some smaller than a dime, others as big as a quarter and even some half-dollar sized.

The scallops from the spat bags were released overboard, often while the boat was under way, occasionally as it drifted with the current. What seemed a random route, Brewer said, was actually a planned dispersal throughout an area that the fishermen had identified as a potential nursery area, based on their own observations.Because it takes three to four years for scallops to grow to marketable size, it is too early to tell if the reseeding process is working. The collection process has been a success, according to Dana Morse, an Extension agent with the University of Maine’s Sea Grant program, which has been involved in the project from the beginning.

“We’re getting better at identifying spat collection areas and understanding when and where to set the spat bags,” Morse said.

The real trick is reseeding the scallops in areas where they will grow.

“The jury is still out on that,” Morse said. “We’ll need a few more years to get good data about how effective we are at reseeding.”

Brewer, however, is confident.

“We haven’t seen improvement yet,” he said. “But it works everywhere in the rest of the world. There’s no reason to think it won’t work here.”