The brightly coloured, symmetric, fan-shaped shells of scallops with their radiating and often fluted ornamentation are valued by shell collectors, and have been used since ancient times as motifs in art, architecture, and design. The word "scallop" is also applied to the meat of these bivalves, the adductor muscle, that is sold as seafood. Many species of scallops are highly prized as a food source, and some are farmed as aquaculture. Scallops have a well-developed nervous system, and unlike most other bivalves all scallops have a ring of numerous simple eyes situated around the edge of their mantles. The majority of species, however, live recumbent on sandy substrates, and when they sense the presence of a predator such as a starfish, they may attempt to escape by swimming swiftly but erratically through the water using jet propulsion created by repeatedly clapping their shells together. A small minority of scallop species live cemented to rocky substrates as adults, while others attach themselves to stationary or rooted objects such as seagrass at some point in their lives by means of a filament they secrete called a byssal thread. They are one of the very few groups of bivalves to be primarily "free-living", with many species capable of rapidly swimming short distances and even migrating some distance across the ocean floor.
Scallops are a cosmopolitan family of bivalves found in all of the world's oceans, although never in fresh water.
However, the common name "scallop" is also sometimes applied to species in other closely related families within the superfamily Pectinoidea, which also includes the thorny oysters. Scallop ( / ˈ s k ɒ l ə p, ˈ s k æ l ə p/) is a common name that encompasses various species of marine bivalve mollusks in the taxonomic family Pectinidae, the scallops. Argopecten irradians, the Atlantic bay scallop
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