Saving Seafood

MAINE: American Aquafarms application still stalled

January 13, 2022 — American Aquafarms’ Project Development Director Tom Brennan has a key to the closed Maine Fair Trade plant. Brennan says the power, heat and Wi-Fi are all on in the Prospect Harbor facility that has not yet changed hands. He says the Norwegian-backed company is planning to launch its series of online “Community Conversations” in coming weeks.

In addition, Brennan said American Aquafarms took down its website weeks ago. A new site has been designed and will be launched in the near future.

Reached late last week while driving from Prospect Harbor to southern Maine, Brennan said it’s his understanding that American Aquafarms is close to resolving the issue of sourcing juvenile Atlantic salmon or smolt for the startup phase of its proposed $250 million project. The company plans to eventually construct a fish hatchery at the shuttered Maine Fair Trade facility. If the project is approved, the salmon will be grown to market size in pens in Frenchman Bay.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

 

How Probiotics Can Save the East Coast Shellfish Industry

January 12, 2016 — Bob Rheault was having an open house at his young shellfish hatchery, so he arrived early in the morning with bottles of wine and plates of cheese. That’s when he noticed he had a problem.

“There was an odd substance floating on the surface of the tanks,” Rheault says. He looked through a microscope, “and there were no bodies to be seen … just empty shells with bacteria climbing all over them.”

In oyster and clam hatcheries, a bacterial infection can cause the population to drop from 10 million to 1,000 larvae overnight. That’s what happened to Rheault, who had no larvae to show his open house guests. Antibiotics aren’t approved for use in U.S. shellfish hatcheries (though they are worldwide)—and, by the time an infection sets in, all the larvae are dead anyway—so the only thing for a hatchery owner to do when confronted with an infection is dump everything out, clean the tanks, and start over.

Or that used to be the only approach. Now, researchers at two labs seem to have found a solution.

The problem of bacterial infections in hatcheries has been worsening over the past decade as the waters of the Northeast warm. Rheault, who is now the president of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association, says that thanks to climate change, bacterial infections now kill off 10 to 20 percent of the Northeast’s shellfish larvae each year. And because the bacteria, Vibrio, gets into the tanks via seawater, it affects not only shellfish but also lobsters, by turning their shells black and making them impossible to sell. (Some lobstermen eat the animals themselves or send them to be cooked and processed, since the meat is still good.)

Researchers have now found a tool to fight the Vibrio bacteria: probiotics. Teams at both NOAA’s Milford Laboratory in Connecticut and the University of Rhode Island (URI) have harvested beneficial bacteria from healthy adult oysters that can help oyster larvae fight off bacterial infections. And the URI researchers are exploring the possibility that a similar concoction could help treat lobster shell disease as well.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

 

Drought Forces Trout to Be Trucked From California Hatchery

August 13, 2015 — FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — Tons of rainbow trout had to be rescued from a Central California fish hatchery and moved by truck to cooler lake water, sparing them from the state’s relentless drought, wildlife officials said Wednesday.

About 80,000 pounds of trout were scooped up from the San Joaquin Hatchery near Fresno and hauled 30 miles uphill to Shaver Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Temperatures in Millerton Lake, which flow through into the hatchery on the San Joaquin River, had reached nearly 70 degrees, threatening the trout’s survival, The Fresno Bee reported (http://bit.ly/1Ns8OG3 ).

“The drought is having a devastating effect,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Andrew Hughan said. “We’re really making an effort to save as many fish as we can and get them into cold water before it gets any warmer.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times