Blue Ocean Mariculture is a vertically integrated commercial fish production company growing Hawai’ian Kanpachi (Seriola rivoliana) on and off the coast of Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i. Before the fish can be raised to harvest size, processed, marketed and sold, all of the hundreds of thousands of juveniles transferred to offshore net pens yearly are produced within our single hatchery.
For more than 22-years, Blue Ocean Mariculture and its predecessor Kona Blue Water Farms have worked within a single 2.5 acre lot to write the code on how to efficiently and predictably produce commercial quantities of healthy and whole Hawai’ian Kanpachi juveniles. The vast majority of this work has taken place within a single 2.5 acre lot located inside a one-of-a-kind aquaculture technology park, the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority. During these last 2 decades, hundreds of passionate and tireless biologists, growers, engineers, pathologists and jacks of all trades have been involved in creating the hatchery we now proudly operate.
Beyond the obvious need for a deep institutional understanding of all aspects of culture, our company has learned many important lessons in the challenges of operating a small, and simultaneously high-output facility. The necessity of managing a 365 day/year complex biological process within a high labor cost, remote site has been a catalyst for aggressive and creative management strategies. A prime example, automation, has yielded innovative and high-return on investment solutions to age-old labor-intensive tasks such as siphoning, feeding, greening and counting. Moving forward, using tools like genetics, AI and advanced hatchery equipment, we plan to bring our production to the next level of sophistication and consistency.