Shellfish aquaculture is a rapidly expanding agricultural industry in the United States, with landings more than doubling in the last 5 years and creating many new jobs. Culture techniques and the water-filtering nature of oysters make them a very low impact crop with arguably, a net benefit to the environment (a unique trait compared to other intensively farmed proteins). Comprised of salt and brackish in-water farms, shellfish farms raise animals born from hatcheries and ultimately sold to market. Shellfish hatcheries represent the tip of the pyramid in this industry where a large and diverse shellfish production market (thousands of companies) is serviced by a comparative handful of hatcheries (tens of companies). These hatcheries are relatively expensive and sophisticated operations requiring significant water handling and filtration equipment, large capacity for growing micro-algae feed, and other various life-support systems to hold, propagate, and grow juvenile oysters, but have notoriously inconsistent production for a variety of reasons including a delicate larval husbandry phase, harmful algal blooms, upland runoff, pathogenic bacterial species, acidified water, and more. This scenario of large scale hatchery production in relatively few places is precarious, the failure of just one of these facilities reducing seed supply to the industry. This project offers an alternative to the current status quo in U.S. shellfish hatchery production with the continued development of a highly efficient prototype mobile hatchery capable of moderate scale seed production fitted inside a 53 foot tractor trailer. Integral to producing seed in this hatchery will be the use of a novel setting system necessary to metamorphose oyster larvae into juveniles or seed. This project will evaluate this new setting methodology by comparing it with more traditional setting techniques. Should it prove to be effective, the facility will be evaluated overall in its ability to consistently produce oyster seed at moderate scale. With multiples of such a facility, hatchery production could become more decentralized effectively reducing seed supply shortages through redundancy while also allowing more participation in the seed market, increasing diversity.
