Sea lice infestations at salmon farm sites are a persistent global problem that exacts significant biological, economic, and sociological costs on salmon net pen aquaculture. Industry has invested considerable resources and ingenuity over the past four decades into control measures. These include drugs, vaccines, physical barriers, lasers, thermal de-licing, selective breeding, and functional feeds. No one method has proven to be 100% effective, and every method comes with drawbacks and costs. Growers often employ multiple control measures in an approach known as integrated pest management, or IPM. Key focuses of IPM are on prevention and using the least toxic approach first, and beginning in about 2010, one of the most widely adopted alternative biological pest control strategies became the use of cleaner fish. Several wild caught wrasse species were deployed as cleaner fish in Europe, but when it became evident that hatchery production was necessary, industry settled on ballan wrasse and lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus) as being the most suitable species for this approach.
Cooke Aquaculture of Maine, the only net-pen salmon company operating in the United States, followed these developments with interest. In 2019, the US Lumpfish Consortium was formed with industry support from Cooke and financial support from NOAA Sea Grant. The Consortium was made up of scientists from Cooke Aquaculture, the University of New Hampshire, University of Maine, USDA National Cold Water Marine Aquaculture Center, and the UMaine Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research (CCAR). The lack of a captive domestic lumpfish broodstock population was identified as a key problem limiting research and deployment at US pen sites. In 2022, the CCAR, with support from other Consortium members, launched a NOAA Sea Grant funded project to establish a domestic lumpfish broodstock population.
Juvenile young-of-the-year (YOY; <1 gram) and 2nd year lumpfish (<30 grams) associate with floating seaweed mats in the summer and fall. Over the course of three seasons, the project captured these juveniles from three distinct regions of the Gulf of Maine to maximize genetic diversity. They were quarantined for 90+ days to establish health status and then grown and acclimated to reproductive maturity within 2-3 years in CCAR recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS). Procedures for preventive health diagnostics, feeding, husbandry, and phase shifted spawning were developed. A pilot-scale RAS hatchery was constructed and in the 3rd project year about 100,000 juveniles were reared to 10+ grams on behalf of Cooke Aquaculture. The project demonstrated the feasibility of establishing a captive broodstock lumpfish colony from wild-sourced juveniles in a relatively short period of time, and it developed protocols that can be applied to future such efforts for lumpfish and potentially other species.