Mullet domestication is an important goal that challenged many countries and research institute for years. It is estimated that Mullet frys are being collected from the wild in several countries at a annual scale of 0.5-1 billion fingerlings. Mullet spawning and juvenile production was achieved at experimental scale in Taiwan in the 1970’s and Hawaii during the 1990’s, but commercialization of mullet fry production has not succeeded yet in the Middle East (ME). Egyptian and Israeli researchers studied closing the life cycle of the grey mullet in the ME in the 90’s, but a stable and predicted spawning process was never achieved at that time , until Israeli researchers at the National Center for Mariculture (NCM) have succeeded to achieve hormonal control of spawning of Mugil Cephalus . Larval rearing protocols for mullet were also developed and included guidelines for salinity, water exchange, algal concentration, temperature, aeration, enrichment of live food, and a schedule for weaning onto dry particulate diets. This larval rearing protocol of the grey mullet includes the option of fresh water acclimation during larval development.
This protocol was transferred to several commercial hatcheries in Israel that continued to improve it and produced in the winter of 2013 about 600,000 high quality mullet fry . Recent years has brought significant progress in scaling up of these protocols to a large and commercial scale hatchery production .
During the last 3-5 years repeated production of mullet fry was achieved in Israel , resulting in a capability of routinely producing millions of fingerlings at a size of several grams, ready to be stocked in ponds and reservoirs for rearing.
At present, due to potential limitation in transportation of fry to several countries in the ME, other options of disseminating and collaborating on the capability of mullet fingerlings hatchery-based production could be considered.