High Performance Aquaculture Broodstock
Most people are aware of the importance that farmers place on stud animals for breeding. Farmers spend billions of dollars each year on selective breeding programmes to improve stock performance. NIWA is now applying this technique to aquaculture.
The Problem
Unlike terrestrial farming, marine farming is a relatively new activity. Consequently high performing selected stocks have only been established for a few of the major fish species, with most marine farmers relying on wild caught fish and shellfish to be the parents of their farmed stock. Using wild broodstock, farmers cannot know whether their stock will come from parents who produce fast growing or slow growing offspring.
The Solution
Recognising the significant opportunity selective breeding offers to improve performance, our scientists and experts in this field have established a broodstock development programme to support the development of the future aquaculture industry for our high value species i.e. kingfish, groper, paua and salmon.
The Result
For Kingfish two important milestones have been achieved in breeding kingfish for aquaculture. The first is ‘closing’ the life cycle and the second, controlled paired matings.
Closing the life cycle in aquaculture means that you can complete the entire life cycle of a species producing viable offspring that themselves breed in captivity. Our scientists have achieved this by breeding from captive kingfish that were themselves produced from eggs in captivity.
This breakthrough means that kingfish rearing no longer depends on catching wild fish and this coupled the achievement of single paired matings, crossing a single male and female in captivity, means that parentage of the resulting eggs is fully known.
These two breakthroughs will allow the establishment of kingfish family lines for our selective breeding programme for the ultimate goal of controlling kingfish pedigree, just as stock managers and breeders do with dairy herds and racehorses. These results we estimate will eventually increase growth performance by as much as 10-20% per generation, which has already been realised with Atlantic salmon farmed abroad.
kingfish breeding in tank at Bream Bay
Quick facts
Location:
National Centre: Aquaculture & Biotechnology
Equipment used:
People involved: Jane Symonds