World Aquaculture Magazine -December 2021

WWW.WA S .ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • DECEMBER 2021 11 and Soybean Meal in Practical Diets for the Channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus .” • Allen Patillo , a recent Ph.D. fromAuburn University who worked under Dr. Terry Hanson won the USAS Best Presentation Award, Second Place for his talk “Performance of Aquaculture Effluent for Tomato Production in Outdoor Raised Beds.” • Kequan (Paul) Chen , Ph.D. candidate in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences studying under Dr. Delbert Gatlin at Texas A&MUniversity, won the Sea Grant Best Presentation Award for their talk “Effect of Phytase on Growth Performance, Mineral Composition, as well as Phosphorus and Nitrogen Excretion of Juvenile Red Drum Sciaenops ocellatus .” • Lauren Swam , M.S. student at Louisiana State University, won the USAS Best Poster Award, First Place for their poster entitled “Assessment of Unique Louisiana Oyster Crassostrea virginica Populations for Adaptation to Low Salinity.” • Hannah Hughes , from Texas State University, working with her advisor Dr. Mar Huertas, won the USAS Best Poster Award, Second Place for her poster “A Comprehensive Guide for Creating and Maintaining a Mid-scale Aquaponic System.” Students, as a reminder, USAS has numerous awards totaling over $13,000 that are available for you to win. You must be a student member of USAS to qualify, so make sure your membership information is up to date. Congratulations again to all of this year’s winners! It is refreshing to meet students and hear about their research and career aspirations. So please, I encourage everyone to make some time in San Diego at Aquaculture 2022 to get to know our students. As we head into winter, I will ask that you each take some time and reflect on USAS, and how our Society can better meet your needs. Whether you are a seasoned veteran with decades of experience or a recent college graduate, we want to hear from you with ideas and feedback on where we’ve been, where we are, and perhaps most important, where we need to go. Please feel free to reach out with comments and/or suggestions. My email is dmcintosh@ desu.edu. Looking forward to seeing you at Aquaculture 2022 in San Diego. —Dennis McIntosh, President U.S. Aquaculture Society I hope this note finds you well. As I write this, I am finalizing my travel arrangements for Aquaculture 2022 in San Diego, CA. Some of you may still be unable to travel due to employer restrictions or are uncomfortable with the idea of sitting in a plane full of strangers flying halfway across the country to attend a conference, and I respect your position. Please know that you will be missed in San Diego. For me, I am excited for the opportunity to get a taste of the ‘old’ normal —participating in a great meeting and all that it brings —presenting my current research, hearing about the latest developments from other labs, visiting the trade show to see the latest technologies, and one of my favorites, catching up with all of you. But before we get to Aquaculture 2022, we have end- of-the-semester winter holidays, and hopefully some much needed down time with family and friends as we celebrate another year. Soon after the holiday season things start to take on new urgency. Making final preparations for the coming growing season is always exciting, with student research projects gearing up and making final edits to our posters and PowerPoints for the annual USAS meeting. Before we know it, Aquaculture 2022 will be here. Again, this year we will be adapting our program in response to the ever-changing COVID landscape and fortunately we did not have to change the meeting dates for Aquaculture 2022, even though international travel for many of our colleagues remains difficult, if not impossible, due to various travel bans and restrictions. No doubt Aquaculture 2022 will be a great meeting, but I must say, that I do look forward to when we can say that COVID is behind us and we can, in fact, go back to the ‘old’ normal of meeting in person without restriction. In my last column, I made a point of listing each of the Aquaculture America 2021 student winners of the abstract and application-based awards. For those that don’t know, USAS also offers judged presentation awards for our student members well. The winners of the Aquaculture America 2021 judged award winners are: • Sidra Nazeer , Auburn University working with Dr. Allen Davis. Sidra won the USAS Best Presentation Award, First Place for their talk entitled, “Use of High Protein Distiller’s Dried Grain Product to Replace Poultry Meal C H A P T E R R E P O R T S Sidra Nazeer, left Allen Patillo, front Kequan (Paul) Chen, left Lauren Swam Hannah Hughes, center