World Aquaculture December 2018

WWW.WA S.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • DECEMBER 2018 5 U.S. Aquaculture Society T his year I have been able to represent USAS at Aqua 2018 in Montpellier, France and again at LACQUA18 in Bogotá, Colombia. Before Aqua 2018 started, I had the opportunity to tour the famous IFREMER research facility and then a sea bass/sea bream/meagre RAS facility that produced fingerlings to distribute for growout to net-pen facilities around the Mediterranean Sea and to a commercial RAS in Connecticut. Before LACQUA18, I had the chance to tour an aquaponics facility in the hills north of Bogotá that raised trout that fertilized four types of lettuce and three types of tomatoes. The positive impacts of aquaculture on these two regions have been huge! After the Bogotá meeting, I was invited to give several talks about aquaculture and biosecurity at the Agroindustrial Training Center (a vocational school specializing in aquaculture and known by the acronym SENA) near Campoalegre which is 200 miles south of Bogotá. They also set up a weekend tour of tilapia cage culture farms and a hatchery in Betania Reservoir one day and then tilapia ponds near the new El Quimbo reservoir the following day. It is amazing how their tilapia industry has grown in the last ten years. We were about 200 miles north of the Equator, so it was pretty warm down there, day and night. After returning to work and trying to get settled in it was time to harvest some of our research fish from ponds at the University of Arkansas - Pine Bluff, during a snowstorm in the middle of November. It is the first time I can remember early snow like that in a long, long time. So on to a USAS update: Webinars We had a very successful webinar entitled “Aquaculture Animal Welfare” with about 200 participants during our live broadcast. Our speakers were Drs. CraigWatson, Ben Diggles, Howard Browman and Randy MacMillan. If you didn’t catch the live broadcast, the recording can be found at usaquaculture.org/ webinars (#19). You can also view any of our previous webinars while browsing. Future webinars are being planned on aquaculture feeds, local foods and aquaculture products and basics of recirculating aquaculture systems. Workshops We are offering three Continuing Education workshops for Aquaculture 2019 on Best Aquaculture Practices, Commercial Aquaponics andWater Quality. You can view the detailed flyers and register for these at the Aquaculture 2019 information page on the WAS website. Future Conferences Aquaculture America 2020 will be in Honolulu, so start planning your research now to attend. In the future, we hope to hold meetings at some of the venues suggested during our survey this spring (Tampa, FL; Charlotte, NC; Savannah, GA; Atlanta, GA; Jacksonville, FL). USAS Elections Our Election Committee has come up with a good list of candidates for the upcoming ballot, which should be out soon. Don’t forget that this is YOUR organization and we need to get as many members as possible to vote on the future leaders of USAS! Sponsorships For the past few years, USAS has approved a limited budget to help sponsor smaller state or regional aquaculture meetings to help further student involve- ment. As an example, the upcoming Northeast Aquaculture Confer- ence and Exposition is a meeting that we will help sponsor and send two students to help bring awareness of USAS to attendees. Keep this in mind if your local meeting warrants USAS sponsorship. If you have any questions, feel free to contact a USAS Officer or Board Member for more information. Finally, we are looking forward to Aquaculture 2019 in New Orleans. This meeting is a triennial WAS meeting in the US and we are glad to be co-sponsors of this event with the National Shellfisheries Association, AFS Fish Culture Section, the National Aquaculture Association and the Aquaculture Suppliers Association. Remember, 2019 is a special year for WAS and JWAS as it is the 50th anniversary. The theme of the meeting is “Aquaculture, the Big Easy Choice!” so come on down to the Big Easy and let the good times roll! As always, we encourage members of USAS (and all WAS Chapters) to support and submit your quality manuscripts to JWAS. Thanks! —David Straus, President C H A P T E R R E P O R T S New Book in the WAS Online Store Cleaner FishBiology andAquacultureApplications edited by Jim Treasurer. Cleaner fish are increasingly being deployed in aquaculture as a means of biological control of parasitic sea lice, and consequently the farming of wrasse and lumpfish, the main cleaner fish species in current use in salmon farming, is now one of the fastest expanding aquaculture sectors with over 40 hatcheries in Norway alone. Cleaner Fish Biology and Aquaculture Applications reviews and presents new knowledge on the biology of the utilized cleaner fish species, and provides protocols in cleaner fish rearing, deployment, health and welfare. The latest knowledge is presented on specialist technical areas such as cleaner fish nutrition, genetics, health, immunology and vaccinology, welfare, transport and fisheries. Specific chapters detail cleaner fish developments in the main salmon-producing countries. The book comprehensively addresses the questions of sustainability of cleaner fish use in aquaculture, bottlenecks to the optimum production of cleaner fish, and improvements and best practice in on-farm deployment methods, for optimum survival and enhanced welfare of cleaner fish.