Science Centres: Fisheries

 

Dr Jane Symonds at NIWA’s Bream Bay Aquaculture Park. (Photo: Seumas Walker,NIWA)

NIWA’s strategy for improving the performance of key aquaculture broodstock aims to help realise government and industry growth targets of $1 billion by 2025.

The challenge the sector faces is to transform the developing kingfish, paua, and groper farming sectors into large-scale, commercially successful, and robust industries. To achieve its potential, the sector needs to develop elite broodstock, along with systems for the regular production of proven high quality seed.

At the helm of NIWA’s international, multi-disciplinary broodstock research team is Dr Jane Symonds, a world-class scientist with extensive experience in finfish breeding. Jane is leading NIWA research into the application of selective breeding and DNA marker technologies to generate high-performance broodstock, with traits of commercial importance, capable of producing vastly superior seed. To complement this, new methods are being developed for maintaining and manipulating broodstock for year-round quality seed production: a pre-requisite for building efficient, large-scale aquaculture production capacity.

Dr Symonds worked for New Zealand King Salmon Ltd in the 1990s and then moved to Canada, where she firmly established that sophisticated, technologyled broodstock selection can dramatically improve commercial production efficiency.