****Embargoed till 0600 Thursday April 2nd, 2015****
2 April 2015
News Release: New Zealand Greenshell mussel breeding begins at brand new
hatchery in Nelson
Image for publication: Greenshell™ mussels like those that will be bred at the SPATnz
hatchery opening this week in Nelson.
Video: Look inside the world’s first purpose built Greenshell™ mussel breeding
hatchery.
New Zealand aquaculture will be getting stronger mussels, thanks to some
heavyweight Kiwi science underway in Nelson.
A new hatchery and lab facility is about to open just north of the city at the
Cawthron Aquaculture Park, where Greenshell™ Mussels can be selectively bred like
sheep or cattle to give our mussel farmers the very best that nature has to offer on
their mussel farms.
The project leaders say it takes the element of chance out of mussel farming.
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Gary Hooper, CEO of Aquaculture New Zealand, says until now mussel farmers have
been very much dependent on mother nature.
“All of our mussel spat is caught wild. For example, we have to wait for it to wash up
onto 90 Mile Beach attached to seaweed. We just have no control over it.
“If farmers can get their spat from a hatchery, that changes a lot. They will know
what they’re getting and when they’ll get it, and it will produce high performing
mussels.”
Rodney Roberts, the Programme Manager at SPATnz, says mussel parents need all
the help they can get.
“In nature, one female mussel might spawn thirty or forty million eggs. The vast
majority of those won’t survive. Those sorts of rates make things tough for mussels
and tough for us trying to produce baby mussels in a hatchery. Survival rates like
that would make our hatchery completely uneconomic, so we’ve had to develop
methods that let us do much better.”
SPATnz, which stands for Shellfish Production and Technology New Zealand Limited,
is a Primary Growth Partnership (PGP) programme – a collaboration between
industry and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). SPATnz’s aim is to produce
innovations to advance New Zealand’s mussel aquaculture industry and deliver
benefits for New Zealand’s economy. The new hatchery is part of this seven year
SPATnz PGP programme, with equal funding of $13m each from MPI and commercial
partner Sanford.
Ted Culley, General Manager of Processing at Sanford, says he’s thrilled with the
new hatchery and the work being done there.
“When you walk in there you see state of the art knowledge being used in a state of
the art facility to produce Greenshell™ mussel spat. It hasn’t been done like this
anywhere else in the world. We are at the cutting edge of technology here and
eventually this programme will benefit the whole of the mussel business and
potentially beyond.”
Ben Dalton, Deputy Director-General at the Ministry for Primary Industries, says
there are substantial benefits for the wider economy.
“This is a great investment. The initial financial benefits are expected to be around
$80 million a year by 2026 or up to almost $200 million per year if the technology is
adopted throughout the industry in New Zealand.”
Cawthron Institute Chief Executive, Professor Eason, says SPATnz’s hatchery opening
is a great milestone in more than 20-years’ research by Cawthron and industry into
breeding Greenshell mussels.
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“Great work like this is a direct result of science and industry working together. It
means mussels have the potential to become an increasingly higher-value product.”
SPATnz scientists say it was important to them that the technology used to breed the
mussels was natural and sustainable.
Our breeding programme relies on conventional selective breeding – just like
terrestrial farmers have used for generations. There is no genetic engineering
involved but modern techniques like DNA fingerprinting are really useful to make
sure that our breeding population remains genetically diverse. It’s not about
breeding one line of “super mussel” – it’s about maintaining a wide range of high
performing lines to choose from.
We feed them all natural algae like they would eat in the sea and we keep them in
clean seawater. As a result, we can naturally breed healthy baby mussels to
underpin a wonderfully sustainable and nutritious food.
“Greenshell™ mussels have among the best sustainability credentials of any seafood,
so it is great to be supporting the next phase of development for an iconic Kiwi
product.”
Scientists at SPATnz use a wash of cold water to encourage their mussel parents to
spawn. It’s a deceptively simple process but getting things exactly right has taken a
lot of time and some painstaking research.
They are only two years into the seven-year PGP programme, but in just a matter of
weeks the very first batch of mussel spat from the new hatchery will be going out to
farms.
The Numbers
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The SPATnz hatchery opens on Thursday 2 April
Twelve people are employed at the facility at present
Greenshell™ mussels is the trademarked trading name for New Zealand
green lipped mussels and they are currently worth around $300m a year to
New Zealand’s economy
Aquaculture generally is worth around $470m to New Zealand annually and
the industry wants to grow to be a billion dollar sector
Right now it can take around 36 months to grow Greenshell mussels from
spawning to the right size for harvest. Using a range of mother nature’s best
mussel stocks, SPATnz hopes to reduce that to 27 months
When the programme reaches the end of its second stage, SPATnz expects to
have developed hatchery methods capable of producing spat for around 30
thousand tonnes a year equivalent of adult mussels. Right now the industry
produces around 94 thousand tonnes of mussels a year.
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Mussels can swim. When they are in the larval stage they spend three weeks
swimming around looking for a place to land, settle and grow.
ENDS
A SPATnz newsroom for media is here with videos, hi-res images and the full story
available for download and publication.
For all media enquiries on SPATnz, please contact:
Trish Sherson at Sherson Willis on 021 570 803 or e-mail trish@shersonwillis.com
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