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Volume 2 Number 10
Announcements
Workshop on "Fancy Livebearers" On
Saturday, October 21, from 9:00 A.M. to
noon, a workshop on fancy livebearer
tropical fishes will be presented at the
Komohana Agricultural Complex, 875
Komohana St. in Hilo, by Dr. Clyde
Tamaru, Aquaculture Specialist with the
Sea Grant Extension Service and the
Aquaculture Development Program on
Oahu, and Mr. Fred Morita from the
Honolulu Aquarium Society, a nationallyrecognized breeder of livebearers. They
will discuss and illustrate selection,
breeding, and production of the so-called
"fancy" platys and swordtails, meaning
those with selectively bred elaborate fin and
tail features. Participants will learn to judge
and select features best developed for
market acceptance; live samples will be
distributed. The workshop is offered at no
cost to participants. Call Jim Szyper at 9599155 for further information or to register.
Arrive at 8:30 for coffee and conversation
with other participants.
The Small Business Tax Workshop will be
presented in both West and East Hawaii in
October 2000
October.
The Hawaii Small Business
Development Center Network, along with
the Internal Revenue Service and the
Hawaii State Tax Department will help
small business operators understand how to
plan and handle their tax situations. The
workshop will be held at the Kona Airport
Training Room on Tuesday, October 24,
and at the Hawaii Community College
multipurpose room in Bldg. 379 in Hilo on
Wednesday, October 25, from 9:00 A.M. to
4:00 P.M. There is a fee of $20; deadline to
register is October 20. Call 933-0776.
The Hawaii Aquaculture Association will
hold its annual meeting at the Waikiki
Aquarium on Saturday, October 28 from
6:00 to 10:00 P.M.
This is a good
opportunity to meet with members of our
statewide aquaculture community, and
enjoy the usual good dinner and party as
well as the Waikiki Aquarium. The HAA
provides members with a voice in the
government/ political arena, information
sources including a newsletter, and other
benefits such as discounts on farm
materials. The annual membership dues is
$30. There is a fee of $5 per member for
this dinner meeting and Aquarium visit.
Readers’ contributions are invited with aloha, and much appreciated, though not all can be used. They may be mailed, faxed or
emailed to the editor at this address. Contributors understand that materials may be edited for space and other considerations.
This newsletter is part of a cooperative project funded by the University of Hawaii Sea Grant Extension Service, the UH
Cooperative Extension Service, and the State of Hawaii Aquaculture Development Program.
Editor: Jim Szyper
875 Komohana St., Hilo, HI 96720-2757
telephone: 808 959 9155 fax: 808 959 3101 email: jszyper@hawaii.edu
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Non-members are invited and welcome, and
are encouraged to join HAA on the spot and
join the festivities for $5 per person as
above rather than pay the $15 per person
non-members fee. For further information,
call Howard Takata at 935-3010 or email
howardt@interpac.net. Howard is a newly
elected member of the HAA Board of
Directors, and welcomes input or questions
from the community.
Workshop: Facilitating Strategic Thinking
and Planning On Thursday and Friday,
November 2 and 3, from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00
P.M., at the Naalehu Clubhouse (near the
Ka’u Family Center), Dr. Donna R. Ching
of the UH Manoa Department of Human
Resources will present a workshop designed
to teach participants to help organizations
make proactive, future-oriented plans. This
workshop builds upon (and requires that
participants have taken), the workshop
Learning to Lead Collaboratively. There is
a fee of $150, ($112.50 for university
faculty). Confirm registration and payment
by October 20. Call Donna Ching at 808
956-2255 for further information. Jim
Szyper at 959-9155 can fax you the flyer
and registration form. Learning to Lead
Collaboratively, which was presented in
Kona in August, will be repeated in
Honolulu on December 13 and 14.
Farm Supply Cooperative is open weekdays
at 366 E. Kawili St. It is a relatively new
organization that was featured in a recent
article (Sept. 21) in the Hawaii TribuneHerald. They sell materials and supplies at
discount prices to members (they have
several kinds of plastic tanks), act as a
clearinghouse for used equipment, and
appear to be willing to think flexibly: “We
help guys sell their fish or their produce,”
Literature Online, continued
Want to retrieve papers from journals but
don't have a "hawaii.edu" email address?
Now, at least until December 1, you can
search and print full text articles from some
issues at the World Aquaculture Society
site, www.was.org.
Aquaculture and
Aquacultural Engineering and others are
available. After December 1, these journals
will be restricted to users with email
addresses from institutions whose libraries
subscribe to the journals, meaning that
hawaii.edu will work for many, as it does
on the UH Library sites that have been
previously discussed here. Those sites, as
well as this one, offer search capability for
titles and abstracts regardless of email
address. The PRAISE project, described
here earlier, will get you full text hard copy
of articles you find. On the WAS site,
choose 'Publications,' then 'Aquaculture
Publications,' then 'Journals,' and you'll
have a start. This site is now advertising
itself as a comprehensive gateway to
aquaculture information, and is worth a
"Parts per Million"
1 ppm is equal to 1 inch in 16 miles,
1 ppm is one minute in two years.
1 ppm is a one gram needle in a ton of hay,
1 ppm is one penny in $10,000.00,
1 ppm is 1 ounce (30 gm) of salt in 62,500
pounds (28,375 kg) of sugar,
1 ppm is 1 large mouthful of food when
compared with the food a person will eat
in a lifetime,
1 ppm is the theoretical concentration that 1
teaspoon of DDT will impart to the hay
when spread on 5 acres of alfalfa,
1 ppm is 1 drop in 16 gallons, or in 80
"fifths," a very dry martini indeed!
- (source unknown to editor)
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FEATURED AQUABUSINESS
Hawaiian Sturgeon and Caviar
Company
Why do we have so many exotic products in
Hawaii aquaculture? The main reason
probably involves the competitive advantage of being the first (or only) to market a
new product. Development of new products
may require gathering of new information
(research) and patient persistence. It appears that Howard Takata, U.H. Hilo’s Dr.
Kevin Hopkins and their partners in Hawaiian Sturgeon and Caviar Company understand all this, particularly the part about patience. For the past five years, they have
been rearing a stock of Russian sturgeon,
Acipenser gueldenstaedti, beginning with
imported eyed eggs, and progressing to
near-maturity, with some of the fish weighing more than 80 pounds. They have acquired valuable information about the requirements and growth performance of the
animals, and hope to spawn and rear the fish
through complete life cycles.
Potential products include not only
caviar (an ideal export with a ready market
and high value per unit of weight), but also
fresh and smoked filet from
"juveniles" (pre-reproductives, but not small
in this case), and live fry and juveniles for
potential sturgeon farmers here and abroad.
They grow much more rapidly in what we
consider cool water here than they do in
their chillier natural range.
Based in Hilo at about 950 feet
elevation with a good water source, the
company is about to begin research on
specifics of rearing methods and feed
composition, and plans to bring in fry of 3
additional species of sturgeon (a handful are
used worldwide in commerce and research)
for comparative trials. Some of this work
will be done in collaboration with UH Hilo
and the Extension Service. They have
acquired first hand knowledge of
international live transport, import and
stock control and maintenance requirements
in Hawaii, techniques for common handling
and assessment of reproductive maturity for
large fish, and other matters of potential
value to other businesses. They have
readily shared much of this information
with the Extension Service (Howard is a
former Sea Grant agent) and others,
including students who are recruited to help
with the periodic weighings, which
everyone (except perhaps the fish) enjoys.
Howard has recently accepted a seat
on the Board of Directors of the Hawaii
Aquaculture Association, and encourages
all Big Island aquaculturists, especially
those in business, to learn about our trade
association and consider joining. He and
his partners look forward to the day when
the aquaculture industry on the Big Island
has grown large enough that supporting infrastructure, including feed manufacture and
diagnostic services, are readily available
here. Contact Howard at 935-3010, or
TECHNICAL NOTES
Big Picture - World Food Level
Summaries of worldwide aquaculture production figures aren’t what they used to be.
They’re much better the last few years, and
more frequent. A good source to start with
is the web site of the Food and Agricultural
Organization of the United Nations, at
www.fao.org.
A recent item in the Oceanspace
(OS, www.oceanspace.net) electronic newsletter (Issue 274, Friday, October 6) compares aquaculture production with beef production. The newsletter cites the Worldwatch Institute (WI, www.worldwatch.org)
as the major source. A few of the major
points are summarized here; comments in
parentheses are by your editor. Readers
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who would like to add comments for discussion in BIAN are invited to do so.
The article states the total world
aquaculture production at 31 million tons in
1998, and gives the rate of increase since
1990 at 11% per year. WI projects, says
OS, that “fish farming is poised to overtake
cattle ranching as a food source by the end
of this decade,” (comparing total aquaculture tonnage with total beef cattle production, it appears). Rangeland cattle production is about 80% of the total of 53 million
tons per year and has leveled off, like the
harvest of capture fisheries at about 86 t/y.
Therefore, production of both cattle and
aquatic products can be increased only in
managed facilities (feedlots and aquafarms).
If we’re going to feed our food animals, efficiency is important. The article
gives the FCR for grain into cattle at 7, that
for grain into fish at 2 or less (without mention of fish meal nor protein of any sort).
Because it takes 1000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, the efficiency difference is important for world water resources
as well as the more obvious aspects of feed
cost for production.
Finally, the article recognizes that,
of aquaculture’s 31 million tons in 1998, 21
came from China. In all, developing countries produced 85% of the tonnage; among
industrial countries, Japan, the U.S., and
Norway led in tonnage, the U.S. contribution being about 0.45 million tons. WI projects rapid growth to continue during the
coming decade (and appears to view “us”
more favorably than does the Environmental Defense Fund, but that’s another
story).
Big Tank Covers
Do you have a large circular tank that you’d
like to cover with a tarp, shade cloth, or
maybe transparent plastic to create some
greenhouse warming? For tanks of 8 ft diameter and larger, it’s often best to place the
covering over a dome-shaped support,
which keeps the cover away from the water
and makes it easier for people to work in the
tank. With tank diameters of 8 to 12 ft or a
bit more, it is easy to lash two pieces of
lumber or pvc pipe together at the center of
a cross, and attach the ends to the tank rim.
At 20 ft and larger, this idea presents problems involving the tradeoff between
strength and flexibility of the members: the
structure sags or flexes too readily in the
wind.
Many years ago, Bob Bourke, now
of Oceanit Laboratories in Honolulu, solved
this problem for a project we worked on
together. He adapted a geodesic dome design to the tank size (20 ft) and materials
(pvc) we had at hand. The drawing here
shows a “two phase” design, named for its
including only 2 parts of a complete sphere,
the top cap region and one encircling band
of triangles below it. If you’d like the parts
list and brief instructions, call or email Jim
(thanks to Bob for his willingness to share).
Two of these domes survived Hurricane Iwa
intact at Makapuu Point.
You may be aware that geodesic
domes have wide application through the
present day. There is a description of a
similar idea on the site: w3.one.net/
~monkey/geodesics/pvcstruts/. The author
found it difficult to flatten the ends of the
pipes in order to bolt them together. The
15-year-older solution used a pvc bending
heater to soften them easily. The site’s illustrated suggestion about cutting with a
band saw may be a workable alternative.
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