Off-bottom Oyster Culture Research Proposal Funded

August 14, 2024

Louisiana Sea Grant (LSG) is the recipient of a $159,000 grant from NOAA’s National Sea Grant Office (NSGO) to support and improve aquaculture. Twenty-four such grants that focus on aquaculture research, extension, education and communication activities, totaling $4.7 million, were recently announced.

The LSG grant is titled Developing a Quality Management Package for Recordkeeping and Seed Conditioning in an Oyster Nursery. Elizabeth Robinson, director of LSG’s oyster lab on Grand Isle, is principal investigator (PI). Sarah Bodenstein, a postdoctoral researcher at the lab, is Co-PI.

Oyster seed from a nursery silo.

Their project is designed to aid the off-bottom oyster farming industry in the Gulf of Mexico region. Off-bottom farmers rely on hatcheries to produce oyster seed and larvae. A lack of hatcheries – there are 13 across the Gulf, with five being university or state-run – can be detrimental to oyster farmers as the availability of hatchery-produced seed becomes a limiting factor. One potential solution is for farmers to build their own nurseries and have multiple life stages of oysters in-house at any given time to reduce reliance on outside operations.

Due to the variety of nursery systems, creating a standardized nursery-development package is difficult. One solution, though, is to create nursery-development tools that rely on the principles of harmonization. To establish harmonization across nurseries, integration of quality management (QM) is key – ensuring an end-product of consistent quality and reproducibility across multiple nursery facilities.

Robinson and Bodenstein intend to develop QM techniques for oyster nurseries by creating a package that includes open-hardware recordkeeping devices designed to measure and count oyster seed in upweller systems. And, researchers will conduct studies to improve seed conditioning practices in nurseries, and create seed conditioning guidelines to reduce oyster mortality on farms. This package should enable off-bottom oyster farmers to grow their own seed efficiently in nurseries and increase oyster survival on their farms.