Marine Finfish Aquaculture
If it were easy,
everyone would be doing it! As I read the last issue of Aquaculture Magazine with great interest, I couldn’t help but notice that marine fish culture was very well By Mark Drawbridge *
T
he associated article on yellowtail farming in Chile by Kolkovski and Lacamara covered the current production process at one advanced commercial operation in good detail and also described future R&D needs. Vargas provided a focused article on a seemingly simple decision of what tank color to use in larval rearing of a
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represented, including the cover photo of some tasty yellowtail!
given species. Finally, Sims gave a status report on open ocean mariculture from a recent offshore aquaculture conference held in Turkey. Each of these articles was thought-provoking in its own way, and inspired me to use them as a springboard for further thoughts and discussion from our experiences at Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute (HSWRI) in California, U.S.A. The title of this piece came to me as I thought more about what I had read in the above-mentioned articles and gave consideration to the state of the industry in general. All professions come with varying degrees of challenges and rewards (aka failures and successes), and marine fish farming is no different. The recipe for success is complicated depending on various economic, political/regulatory, and technical factors. Being such a relatively new industry, marine finfish farming is skewed toward the challenges, which is great for those with a pioneering spirit but not necessarily so for investors. As a research scientist I spend my days focused on the technical ingredients for success, which necessarily includes a strong awareness of the economic realities of production at various scales. As someone who oversees a commercialscale research hatchery, I also have a
keen awareness of political and regulatory considerations for egg-to-plate farming. In the U.S. this process has been paralyzed in the experimental phase along the continuum of experimental-pilot-commercial project scaling, at least when it comes to efforts to farm offshore. Applying a “never give up” spirit, we have sought to overcome this paralysis by testing various species of fish, diets and cage systems in the neighboring waters of Mexico. Other U.S. companies have done the same. As indicated by Kolkovski and Lacamara, one of the challenges of breeding large pelagic fishes (i.e. 1530kg each) is the large tank volume required for natural spawning. The large volume translates into greater space, maintenance, and operational requirements. We have good success breeding species like yellowtail, white seabass (Atractoscion nobilis) and California halibut (Paralichthys Californicus) in tanks of 40-140 m3. Working in southern California, we are invariably limited by space, so we often wonder how small of a breeding tank can successfully be used for a given species. The depth of water required for courtship and spawning is a related question of interest. Of course if it is critical to get lots of high quality eggs from a population, it is always