Tome hatchery is a part of the national scientiďŹ c institute
Breeding ďŹ sh for restocking purposes BIOR, the Institute of Food Safety, Animal Health, and Environment, can trace its history back to the 1940s. Since then the institute has been through several rounds of restructuring resulting today in a national research centre in the ďŹ elds of public and environmental health as well as food, ďŹ sheries, and veterinary medicine. The institute is an acknowledged leader in the Baltic region with excellent theoretical and applied research capabilities within these ďŹ elds and is also the National Reference Laboratory for state monitoring programmes.
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roadly speaking, in the fisheries and aquaculture field BIOR consists of a department of research into fish resources, and the fishfarm Tome. The Fish Resource Research Department is responsible for studying fish stocks in Latvian waters in the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Riga, as well as in inland waters, to ensure that they are used sustainably. The department contributes to the information on stocks regulated by European legislation that provides a scientific basis for decisions regarding annual total allowable catches (TAC) in the EU. It also monitors the condition of stocks that are not regulated at the European level evaluating the influence of commercial fishing, angling, and of the environment. The data
on fish stocks collected by the institute are part of the national programme for the collection of fisheries data for which the institute is responsible. In addition to this biological research the department also carries out economic analyses of the fishing fleet, fish processing industry, and the aquaculture sector.
New centre for training fish farm staff is service to aquaculture industry The fish farm Tome is primarily a hatchery and on-growing facility for several fish species that, once they reach a certain size, are released into the wild. In early 2016 Tome established an Aquaculture Research and Education Centre where courses, and
One of the pilot recirculation systems at the Aquaculture Research and Education Centre, part of the Tome hatchery.
seminars are organised to give theoretical and practical training to people, both experienced and otherwise, working on aquaculture farms. Marcis Ringis, who is responsible for the day to day running of the centre, says that as far as he knows there are no institutions of higher education that provide such training, so the centre is offering a useful service to the aquaculture industry. The centre currently has four employees and well-equipped facilities for conducting training programmes, a few rooms where students or others can overnight, and experimental recirculation systems, where pilot studies are being carried out. The centre is working with other institutes both within Latvia and outside to bring external experts to teach or
otherwise contribute to the educational programmes that the centre is conducting. The commercial aquaculture industry in Latvia is focused on freshwater species and most of the training at the Aquaculture Research and Education Centre is connected with these. However, as Didzis Ustups points out, government hatcheries rear a large number of the anadromous marine species, salmon and sea trout, for release into the local rivers, so there is a vast body of knowledge concerned with the initial breeding stages of these species too. In addition, there is currently a project on rope farming of blue mussels at a site between Liepaja and Ventspils on the western coast. The project
The Tome hatchery is the biggest in a network of five state-owned hatcheries that are used to breed fish for restocking.
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