SCOTLAND should consider ways of setting aside parts of its rich sea bed to harvest scallops, a fisheries expert has said.

Michel Kaiser, the new chief scientist at Heriot-Watt University, believes the time has come to find the places where dredging the increasingly popular shellfish does the least damage.

His remarks come amid clam wars between environmentalists – who want a ban on all dredging in inshore waters – and a fishing industry landing 15,000 tonnes of the molluscs a year.

Right now, all but around 5 per cent of Scottish waters are open to year-round dredging, with the industry banned only in highly sensitive marine protected areas (MPAs).

Mr Kaiser suggests rethinking that model. He said: “We have MPAs. We do need space where we can harvest food.

“We have not had a dialogue about which areas should be designated for food production.”

The academic said much of the debate on scallops had become “polarised”.

He said: “At the green end of the spectrum a considerable number of NGOs [non-governmental organisations] would like scallop dredging banned outright because of the damage it does to different habitats.

“From a more scientific perspective, scallop fisheries can be considered to be sustainable because they are clams and they feed at the bottom of the food chain.

There are environmental impacts but they can be managed if we control its footprint.”

Industrial fisherman use drag nets to scrape scallops out of the seabed.

Green groups such as sustainable seafood charity Open Seas say this does huge damage to the marine environment.

Fishermen, who deny ploughing through sensitive areas, counter that they focus on areas where they do not snag their gear.

Mr Kaiser said more work was needed to find out where damage would be least – such as sandy flat areas where plants and animals are already resilient to disturbances from heavy waves or storms.

Adult scallops, clams in Scots, do not move much and tend to grow in the same places year after year. So he believes areas could be set aside for their cultivation, leaving much of the sea out of bounds to dredgers.

“Having a good understanding of what is on the seabed and what is located where, is fundamentally important,” he said, stressing the difficulty of mapping under the sea.

“That is something we don’t have or we have in a very patchy way. It is not like looking at farmland – you can’t just send a drone up and take a nice picture and see where all the fields and forests are.”

Both commercial fishers and groups such as Open Seas – as the name suggests – see the seas as a common resource and space.

But Mr Kaiser also suggests that, with full Brexit on the horizon, the UK could look at setting up a system of quasi-ownership over what would become scallop fields.

Essentially, he is talking about giving local fishers rights to exploit a patch of the seabed – in return for agreeing to a range of conditions.

The scheme, he said, would work like common grazing on land.

He said: “At sea, as soon as you have some form of ownership, people tend to change their behaviour over time because they feel they have control over their future.

“And their rights are not likely to be taken away by somebody else who has no vested interest.

“This is a very current discussion at the moment, particularly with Brexit now here.

“There is an opportunity for the UK to look again at what in the jargon are termed co-management systems where groups of fishers from a defined area – with interests in a particular fishery – are given ownership and responsibility and stewardship of that resource.

“That can have all sorts of conditions.

“They have to participate in the science. They have to be part of the management. They have to be responsible for setting limits.”