AT THE END OF OUR ROPE: DEVELOPING NEXT-GENERATION MARICULTURE ON A 4-KM SINGLE POINT MOORING
Open-ocean mariculture can produce superb quality seafood, with negligible environmental impact. There is an urgent imperative to scale this industry globally, to meet growing worldwide demand for seafood. Much of this future growth in mariculture could, and perhaps should occur in deeper waters, further offshore. Here, conflict with other ocean users, impact on vulnerable marine habitat, and interactions with wild stocks would all be reduced, and the massive dilutive force of the open ocean is in full effect. Kampachi Farms has therefore been engaged in "the Velella Project," a series of trials aimed at resolving the technical challenges associated with over-the-horizon mariculture, and assessing the biological effects of farming miles from shore, in water thousands of meters deep.
Previous experiments with unanchored "drifter" pens met with great biological success, but presented currently-irresolvable technical challenges. Kampachi Farms is now engaged in a trial of what we believe is the world's deepest-moored mariculture system: a 132m3 brass-mesh Aquapod and 10m long feed barge, moored with a 2:1 scope 11 km off the Kona Coast, in water 2,000m deep. The array was stocked with 2,000 Seriola rivoliana fingerlings on Nov 14th, 2013, intiating a grow-out trial which will continue through May, 2014.
The goal of this Velella "Gamma" trial is to replicate the outstanding biological performance of the previous "Beta" test (including effective control of parasitic Neobenedenia skin fluke through a complete fish grow-out cycle, without resorting to chemical therapeutants) in a moored farm system, while resolving or avoiding technical challenges in positioning the array, automating farm tasks, and exercising effective remote command-and-control capabilities (C3). Secondary goals included the procurement of the first-ever permit for moored aquaculture activities in U.S. Pacific Federal waters, and further investigation of the mechanisms behind the phenomenal biological results of the previous offshore trials.
This presentation will review the protracted permitting process, the engineering and deployment of the 4,000m long mooring array, the operational effectiveness of the farm system automation technologies and remote C3 development, the growout and parasite control results to-date, and the ongoing laboratory and land-based tank experiments on the effects of open-ocean conditions on Seriola health and growth performance. If successful, the Velella Gamma trial should provide validation of the potential for over-the-horizon aquaculture to begin to meet global seafood needs with negligible negative ecological impact.