Aquaculture - Marine Finfish

What are some examples of Marine finish

Codfish and Halibut

Why isn’t it a large part of aquaculture?

Because wild caught fish used to be much cheaper than the aquaculture farmed ones

Why are AQ finfish so expensive to produce?

The larvae are difficult to rear, they are difficult to breed in captivity, sea water means you have to be near the sea and biofouling/corrosion is a large problem.

What is happening with the finfish AQ sector?

It is increasing as we are over exhausting the marine finfish stocks

Sea bream (characteristics)

• Easy to breed

• Popular in europe

• Grown in coastal ponds, lagoons, tanks, and net pens

Milkfish (characteristics)

• the juveniles are caught in coastal lagoons

• Sometimes they are polycultures with shrimp and or mullet

Mullet (characteristics)

• They can spawn - induced via hormones

• they are often polycultures with shrimp, tilapia, and milkfish

Tunas

• often need wild juveniles

• recently captive breeding has been successful

• need very large tanks or net pends to grow them

Cobia

• The females grow fast (6kg in a year)

• There is emerging production in the USA

• They lack a swim bladder so they need to swim or they rest on the bottom

Groupers

• grown manly from wild juveniles

• they are fed low quality fish

• cannibalism is a common problem

American eel

• Their larvae is wild caught

• Nova Scotia is an important player

Atlantic Halibut

• Hard to keep the larvae alive

  • they need 5m deep silos with a halo cline

• there is a large farm in PEI

Striped bass

• They are anadromous

• Done by NS

• A bottleneck:

  • the larvae must inflate their gas bladders at specified times after hatching

  • this can be a problem if there is oil or any other kind of contamination in the water that interferes with this process

Codfish

• Pelagic eggs

  • complicate production

• Canada invested

  • not very successful

Sturgeons

• Caviar production

Atlantic wolffish

• They produce antifreeze proteins

• Newfoundland is a large component of this aquaculture

Lumpfish

• they are raised so that they can clean sea lice of off aquaculture salmon

• they are often captured as juveniles

Cunner

• Also raided to clean sea life off of farmed salmon

• they are captured as juveniles