The opening of the first commercial whelk fishery in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia was celebrated at a ceremony on Tuesday (July 30) at Louisbourg Seafoods, reports the CBC.

Mike Kelloway, the parliamentary secretary to Canada's fisheries minister Diane Lebouthillier, officially declared the fishery opened, although the harvest actually began about a month ago.

Previously, the whelk fishery in Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) Area 4Vs was licensed only for exploratory fishing to determine if the stock could sustain a commercially viable operation, as well as to collect additional biological data, according to a press release from the minister's office. 

Louisbourg Seafoods, owned by Jim and Lori Kennedy, is headquartered in the town for which it is named, on the eastern side of Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island. The company has three other factories in the province that process lobster, mussels, halibut, shrimp, snow crab, redfish and sea cucumbers.

The company began experimenting with whelk more than a decade ago. The mollusk is harvested about 160 kilometers from the town of Louisbourg, along a muddy stretch of the ocean floor. The fishery remains open between July and December, and this year's total allowable whelk catch is 700 metric tons.

The addition of a whelk line allows processing to continue for another four months and provides work for 70 employees at Louisbourg Seafoods, according to manager of operations Allan MacLean. The biggest market for the sea snails right now is in the Asian countries of China, Japan and Vietnam, where the mollusks are popular in buffets, he said.