Planting the Seeds for Hawaiʻi's Next Generation of Marine Aquaculturists:
📸 Kukalia Pililaau
There's an undeniable spark when young minds connect with marine science. We felt that energy firsthand recently at Ocean Era, when we welcomed the students from Waiʻanae High School’s Marine Science Learning Center for their annual Aquaculture Workshop. This visit has become a cornerstone of their program, showcasing real-world applications of their studies, and the diversity of the career paths in aquaculture and marine science right here in Hawai’i.
📸 Kukalia Pililaau
Much thanks to Kai Fox from UH Sea Grant, for assisting with the planning and co-ordination for these students to tour four different companies at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaiʻi Authority (NELHA). For us at Ocean Era, hosting these future scientists is always a privilege.
The Aquaculture Workshop is designed to provide a comprehensive view of the field, taking students beyond textbooks and into the heart of aquaculture operations, community initiatives, and culturally significant sites. This hands-on approach fosters a deeper understanding of sustainable practices and the rich history of aquaculture in Hawaiʻi.
📸 Kukalia Pililaau
Welcoming the Waiʻanae High students to our farm allowed us to share our daily work, explain our sustainable technologies, and witness their curiosity about the future of marine aquaculture.
We see these visits as more than just a day trip; they are an investment in the future of our oceans and our local economy. By providing these students with tangible examples of marine science in action, we hope to cultivate a lifelong passion for aquaculture and inspire them to become the innovators and stewards of tomorrow.
📸 Kukalia Pililaau
The diverse career opportunities within aquaculture – from the intricacies of research to the practicalities of farm management and the critical importance of conservation – are vast. Witnessing the enthusiasm of the Waiʻanae High students leaves us with a strong sense of optimism for the future of this industry in Hawaiʻi.
Thanks again to Waiʻanae High School’s Marine Science Learning Center for to providing such meaningful educational experiences, and to Kai Fox for his continued partnership in making these connections. We are proud to play a role in "planting the seeds" for the next generation of Hawaiʻi’s marine aquaculturists, and look forward to inspiring many more bright young minds at Ocean Era.
Taking Aquaculture Offshore, Beyond the Blue Horizon
Putting fish back into the ocean?
Not such a crazy idea—and we just might save the planet at the same time.
Earth’s oceans are – to use the French idiom – pretty much screwed. From time immemorial we have treated the seas like a cesspool, and a garbage dump. We have relied upon our world’s biggest saline solution to soak up the gases and the heat that we pump into the air. We have scraped and scoured the waters, and whatever got caught up as ‘collateral’ mostly died on the deck. “Plenty more fish in the sea”, we said, as we poured more subsidies into fishing fleets.
It is, in the truest sense, a global crisis. The oceans are humanity’s true common wealth, and what happens in Shanghai or Peru, sooner or later sloshes around and washes up on the beaches of Sydney or Perth.
I began my career in fisheries management, but found the misalignment of incentives disheartening. So I felt drawn to aquaculture; to the more hopeful possibilities of giving back to the ocean, rather than just taking. I tinkered with pearl oysters for a while, but they were just trinkets and baubles: we needed to feed humanity: feed them fish that we grew ourselves.
So we adapted our pearl oyster hatchery technologies to marine fish larval culture, and looked for where we might grow out the fingerlings. In Kona, Hawaii, where we were based, the answer seemed self-evident: offshore. Any decent toss from Kona’s lava cliffs in can land a stone in offshore waters, with nothing to the West but water, until you hit Taiwan, and nothing but ocean to the South, until Antarctica.
I began my career in fisheries management, but found the misalignment of incentives disheartening. So I felt drawn to aquaculture—to the more hopeful possibilities of giving back to the ocean, rather than just taking.
Putting fish into the ocean – (though it’s perfectly OK, somehow, to pull aplenty of them out of the ocean? And it’s perfectly pastoral for bovines to belch methane and nitrous oxide?). Humanity seems to have forgotten how – once we were done wiping out buffalo, dodos and passenger pigeons - we turned to farming cows and chickens.
But quality matters. In the ocean, as on land, bad farm management bites you pretty quickly. The modern aquaculture industry is therefore now a well-spring of innovation, borne of the necessity of stewardship. Almost all -legitimate- environmental issues with earlier forms of fish farming are addressable – by sensible siting to minimize water quality and benthic impacts; improved fish nutrition; better understanding of animal health; vaccines that almost totally eliminate antibiotic use; and robust engineering and oceanographic modeling to minimize fish escapes or marine mammal entanglement.
There’s been a lot of discussion recently in Australia about inshore aquaculture, in particular salmon. Offshore aquaculture addressed many of those concerns. Still, permitting offshore, in the public domain, demands patience. In Kona, it took over three years to acquire the first permits for our offshore farm, culturing amberjack (a kingfish cousin now branded as ‘Hawaiian Kanpachi’). There was initially strident opposition from anti-aquaculture activists. But our guiding principle was to grow our fish in their natural habitat. By moving production into deeper water, further offshore, the potential ecosystem impacts could be drastically reduced. This aspiration has been borne out by sophisticated modelling, and extensive environmental monitoring around the kampachi operation in Kona, and an offshore cobia farm in Panama.
One of the five major recommendations from the recent United Nation’s High Level Panel on Global Climate Change and the Oceans was that humankind needs to transition to less impactful marine-based foods.
“So, what do you feed them?” is the perennial objection. Well … what do wild fish eat? Mostly fish, yes, but if we are going to feed the world, we cannot do that on the backs of Peruvian anchoveta. Market forces – and our industry’s intrinsic environmental ethic - have fomented a proliferation of alternative proteins and oils from agriculture and biotech. In trials in Kona, we have been able to completely eliminate all marine-sourced inputs in kampachi diets, by upscaling pet-food grade poultry meal, soy proteins (aka tofu), flax oil, and crucial omega-3 oils from microalgae. We are proving that you don’t need to feed fish to grow fish, any more than you need to feed crushed canaries to your cat.
The imperatives for growing more seafood are increasingly pressing. It’s no longer simply that more humans are more affluent, and want to eat more sushi. It’s not just our doctors telling us that it’s better for heart-health and brain health. It’s that to feed 10 billion people with beef, at the rate that Australians eat hamburger, would leave earth’s soils looking more like Mars, and our atmosphere more like Venus. Land area limitations, freshwater constraints, and – most tellingly – the global climate crisis all demand that we begin to source more of our food from the oceans.
There is now a growing body of science, and an increasing consensus – from both academia and environmental NGOs - that we must move offshore. One of the five major recommendations from the recent United Nation’s High-Level Panel on Global Climate Change and the Oceans was that mankind needs to transition to less impactful marine-based foods. We might also use macroalgae (seaweeds) to sequester carbon dioxide. We need to start to see the oceans as less a victim of the global climate crisis, and more as part of the solution.
A global analysis of the potential yield of fish, bivalves and seaweeds from offshore aquaculture projects harvests could be up to 100 times the current worldwide seafood consumption. 100 times! So the Next Big Thing – we should hope and pray – will be the expansion of aquaculture into the offshore realm. China and Norway have already deployed fish pens looking like offshore oil rigs, that can contain up to 1.5 million salmon. Net pens twice that size are now under construction.
Australia recently waded out in the right direction, through set-up of a Blue Economy Co-operative Research Center, to develop sustainable energy and aquaculture technologies for offshore, in a partnership between government, research institutions and industry. This needs to be matched by policies that support offshore growth – that streamline the permitting process, while still ensuring common-sense levels of environmental oversight. With secure tenure for offshore operations, catalyzing investments should then flow.
Australia’s ocean area – within our Exclusive Economic Zone – is around 130% of the total land area of the continent. But our wide, brown land is no longer simply girt by sea. Our future is out there – beyond the blue horizon.
Originally published in Cosmos
Researchers Successfully Replace Fishmeal, Fish Oil in Farm-Raised Carnivorous Fish
Best performing “fish-free” diet contains an algae oil rich in essential omega-3 fatty acids.
Kailua-Kona, Hawaii—Researchers in Kona, Hawaii, have made a breakthrough in the quest to develop a cost-effective “fish-free” feed for farm-raised Kampachi, or almaco jack, a carnivorous marine fish prized for its rich, buttery flavor.
The ability to replace fishmeal and fish oil currently used in carnivorous marine fish diets will have important implications for ocean sustainability and meeting the growing demand for seafood around the world.
The trial results are detailed in a technical article in the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s Advocate.
“This is the first time – to our knowledge – that fishmeal and fish oil have been totally eliminated from the diet of a marine carnivorous fish, with no deleterious consequences,” said Neil Anthony Sims, CEO of the Hawaii-based mariculture company, Ocean Era, where the trial was conducted. “Kampachi are a fast-growing, sashimi-grade fish, so this a significant breakthrough for the sustainability and scalability of marine fish farming.”
Ocean Era’s “fish-free” diet comprised of an algae oil rich in essential omega-3 fatty acids.
Aquaculture, the world’s fastest growing food sector, consumes more than 70 percent of the world’s fish oil and fishmeal, which are derived from forage fish like sardines, anchovies and menhaden. Roughly 20 percent of the global wild catch, or 18 million tons of fish each year are converted into fishmeal and fish oil for use in animal feed.
During the three-month trial funded by a Saltonstall-Kennedy grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 480 juvenile Kampachi (Seriola rivoliana) were fed one of four diets. Two of the diets contained no fishmeal, and one of these also contained no fish oil. Fishmeal replacement relied primarily on poultry meal, from up-cycled poultry trimmings. Fish oil replacement was achieved using Veramaris® natural marine algal oil, which contains high levels of two critical omega-3 fatty acids, DHA and EPA. A fishmeal and fish oil diet was used as a control, together with an additional commercial control diet. The fish were stocked into sixteen tanks for the comparative grow-out trial.
The fish that were fed the zero fishmeal / zero fish-oil diet performed as well as the fish fed with the fishmeal and fish-oil diet. Performance was evaluated in terms of growth, feed conversion ratio (FCR), fillet yield and survival. FCR is the ratio of the amount of feed it takes to grow one kilogram of fish.
Juvenile Kampachi (Seriola rivoliana) being stocked into tanks for the F3 trial.
The fish fed the zero fishmeal / zero fish-oil diet also had a more desirable taste compared to the fish fed the commercially available control diet.
“The results clearly show that algal oil can replace fish oil 100 percent without any reduction in growth of this marine fish,” said Rick Barrows, a fish nutrition expert with Aquatic Feed Technologies and co-principal investigator of the study.
The feed formulations used in this trial are available as open source formulae through the F3 Feed Innovation Network (F3 FIN) for anyone working to replace wild-caught fish ingredients in animal feed. F3 FIN encourages sustainable innovations in fish-free aquaculture feed ingredients by sharing experimental protocols, testing facilities and ingredient providers.
Algae oils have been shown to contain twice the amount of EPA and DHA omega-3 fatty acids as fish oil, both of which are important for maintaining fish health and imparting heart and brain health benefits to humans.
“Development of diets that use these upcycled ingredients and microalgal oils is critical to the long-term scalability of marine fish culture, and therefore to our ability to sustainably feed a planet of nine billion people with heart-healthy seafood,” said Sims.
The project, titled “Developing cost-effective fishmeal-free and fish oil-minimized diets for high market value U.S. marine fish aquaculture,” was funded through NOAA’s Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program (NA18NMF4270208). The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service provided feed milling support for the trial. Anthropocene Institute and Ka'upulehu fishponds were collaborating partners on the NOAA grant.
The Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program funds projects that address the needs of fishing communities, optimize economic benefits by building and maintaining sustainable fisheries, and increase other opportunities to keep working waterfronts viable.
A video about the study can be viewed on YouTube.
Ocean Era, LLC (formerly Kampachi Farms, LLC) is a Kona, Hawaii, based R&D company, dedicated to softening humanity’s footprint on the seas, by expanding production of the ocean’s living resources.
Media Contact:
Annie Reisewitz
annie@marcom.llc
858-228-0526
Hawai’i offshore R&D company re-brands as “Ocean Era, LLC”
Kailua-Kona, Hawaii –The Kona, Hawai’i-based offshore R&D company – formerly known as “Kampachi Farms, LLC” - has announced that the company will now be known as “Ocean Era, LLC”. The re-branding initiative better positions the company to address broader opportunities, and more expansive challenges facing aquaculture, and the planet.
The company membership and management structure will remain unchanged, with a total of 11 employees.
Company co-founder and CEO, Neil Anthony Sims, said that the change was driven by a growing awareness of the global imperative for expansion of offshore aquaculture, and the deeper understanding that the need is not just about one species of fish.
“We love our kampachi. It’s a beautiful fish!” said Sims, “But there are multiple issues that now beset the earth – the global climate crisis; ocean acidification; the limitations of fresh water, fertilizers and land-use; and the need to feed 9 billion people by 2050. The oceans are increasingly seen as not so much a victim of these perils, but as part of the solution.“
Kampachi (Seriola rivoliana) inside an aquapod used for our Velella projects.
Ocean Era continues to work on a number of research and development projects with kampachi (Seriola rivoliana, or Almaco Jack), at its Kona, Hawai’i land-based facility. These projects include a selective breeding program for faster-growing, healthier fish, along with trials to accelerate broodstock maturation to amplify the results of the breeding program. In addition, Ocean Era continues to develop alternative feedstuffs for kampachi and other marine fish.
However, Sims said that the company “is already engaged in several other programs that are pursuing innovations for culture further offshore, and lower down the food chain”.
Nenue (chubs or rudderfish) on ice post feed trial and pre sashimi fest.
These include trials with high-value herbivorous reef-fish, such as the rudderfish, or chubs (Kyphosus vaigiensis).
“This is a fish that eats seaweed,” said Ocean Era’s Research Manager Lisa Vollbrecht. “Herbivorous fish offer the opportunity for aquaculture to not just grow fish, but also grow the feed for the fish, potentially without reliance on wild-caught forage fish or terrestrial proteins and oils. It could be a great opportunity for fish farm expansion, particularly for small-scale farms in less-developed countries.”
Three of the Hawaiian seaweeds being tested in the Blue Fields project: Halymenia hawaiiana, Caulerpa lentillifera, and Gracilaria parvispora.
Ocean Era is also working with support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) on the “Blue Fields” project, to develop offshore macroalgae culture systems and identify seaweed species for cultivation for food, feed, fertilizers and fuels. A second ARPA-E project, in collaboration with leading Hawaii and mainland research institutes, is striving to adapt the microbiome of the seaweed-eating Kyphosus to improve the biodigestion of seaweeds.
Ocean Era also continues to pursue the Velella Epsilon project, pioneering the permitting for offshore aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico. Funded largely by the National SeaGrant Program, through University of Florida SeaGrant, this project builds on the prior Velella Beta-test (an unanchored net pen) and the Velella Gamma-test (a single-point mooring net pen operated by remote command-and-control) in Kona. The goal for Velella Epsilon is to obtain the permits for a demonstration-scale single net pen, to be sited around 40 miles offshore of Tampa-Sarasota, on the Florida Gulf Coast.
Dennis Peters, Velella Epsilon Project Manager, said “The intention is to allow the local Florida fishing and boating community to recognize that offshore aquaculture can be a boon. The earlier Velella projects in Kona were phenomenal Fish Aggregating Devices.” The company is presently in the process of obtaining the remaining permits from EPA and US Army Corps of Engineers for this demonstration.
About Ocean Era, LLC:
Ocean Era, LLC (formerly Kampachi Farms, LLC) is a Kona, Hawaii, based R&D company, dedicated to softening humanity’s footprint on the seas, by expanding production of the ocean’s living resources.
Did the sea grapes just move?
A ‘vineyard’ of Caulerpa lentillifera.
In general, seaweed shouldn’t move. Sway? Sure, but crawl? Slither? No, no. Yet there, inside the tank of sea grapes (Caulpera lentillifera), a green, globular, mass was climbing the glass. This looked like sea grapes … but the factor of motility had my biology senses tingling.
We’ve been testing a range of different culture conditions for Caulerpa lentillifera – a green seaweed, the last several months. Caulerpa, or sea grapes is not yet a widely-farmed seaweed, but we believe that it could have great culinary appeal. This “vegan caviar” pops in your mouth, with a burst of ocean flavor. The thallus (or ‘leaf’, if you will) of sea grapes is a cluster of small, green vesicles, called ramuli, that look like tiny grapes.
Our Sacroproteus friend out of camouflage looks more like a pokemon.
What we observed in our tank was akin to watching a bunch of grapes slinking down a trellis. A closer examination revealed a slug-like body beneath the bunch of greenery, and two antennae probing the waters as it slithered forward. Known to science as Sacoproteus smaragdinus, these sea slugs appear similar to nudibranchs, such as the famous “Spanish dancer”, but are only distantly related. The Sacoproteus genus was named after the Greek sea god, Proteus, who could change his shape at will. What an apt name for such a clever algae mimic!
As a gastropod (“stomach-foot” in Latin), our S. smaragdinus literally walks all over its lunch. Most of the species of Sacoproteus seek out just a single Caulerpa species. The slugs sniff out their beloved sea grapes by perching on their sluggy haunches and waving their bodies through the water, hoping a wafting scent of Caulerpa leads them to the vineyard. Each species of slug has a uniquely-shaped tooth adapted to pierce the ‘bubble’ of its preferred species of sea grape. Once they’ve located their lunch/lounge, their special tooth pokes the grape, sucks it dry and stores the green pigments in their bulbous backs as the perfect disguise.
A conspicuous view of the Sacroproteus sp. slug. Photo Credit: Pam Madden
Larval Sacoproteus are planktonic, and drift through the oceans with the currents, until they sense the Caulerpa species of their choice. This can then trigger metamorphosis, and they settle down to a more sedentary life. We suspect that this is probably how this slug “showed up” in our tank; by drifting in through our seawater intake line.
Keeping tabs on our new-found friend is challenging; it’s more like “newly-lost”. Peering through a tank full of green bubble-algae is like one long, losing game of hide and seek, with a slug that Nicholas Paul (an expert on seaweed and algae at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast) says, “may be the best example of an animal masquerading as a plant that we have.”
One Caulerpa, two Caulerpa, three Caulerpa—wait… Photo credit: Pam Madden
More: Would you like further reading? See the National Geographic article: “Stunning new sea slug species looks just like seaweed”
Save a tuna, eat a vegetarian
Seafood has a smaller carbon footprint than any other animal protein (Nijdam et al, 2012). But just like every other kind of meat, the higher the trophic level, the higher the energy input to make it.
For seafood, low trophic level typically means filter-feeding bivalves, such as oysters, or forage fish, such as sardines or mackerel. Most consumers will agree that an ahi fillet is more desirable than a plate of mussels or jellyfish. But what if you could have a hearty, satisfying fillet – sashimi-grade for the poke-lovers – that was also an herbivore? Enter Kyphosidae. At Kampachi Farms we have been working with Kyphosus vaigiensis, an herbivorous reef-fish with a longstanding presence in Hawaiian cuisine.
Kyphosid from local Kona waters; a commonly fished for species, popular as poke. He ded.
This fish is known as enenue or nenue in Hawaiian (rudderfish or sea chubs in Not Hawaiian), and in some regions was regarded as a prized reef fish, reserved for ali’i (royalty) only (Ulukua, 2019). Nenue are found in abundant schools around Hawaii; 2-3-kilogram fish are common, while state records exceed 4.5 Kg. One of the traditional preparations for nenue was poke – a staple of native Hawaiian food, originally consisting of raw reef fish, sea salt, limu (seaweed), and kukui nuts. Poke recently exploded onto the mainland United States fast-food scene; it can be found at myriad stand-alone poke counters as well as at the likes of Red Lobster and The Cheesecake Factory (Dixon, 2016). While Hawaiian poke was traditionally made of a variety of fish, including nenue, the versions in vogue now are based almost exclusively on tuna or salmon, two high-trophic predators.
Nenue have a number of advantages as a candidate for aquaculture. Our research at Kampachi Farms thus far has found that adult nenue spawn readily in captivity. Larvae are exceptionally hardy in preliminary hatchery efforts. Our colleague Syd Kraul at Pacific Planktonics recently raised a final total of 200 baby nenuitos from a small sample of our captive-spawns, in an extensive ‘green-water’ culture system. We are planning larger-scale runs in our research hatchery in the near future. Nenue also have ctenoid scales, with a rough texture and row of tiny teeth at the edge; this armor dramatically aids in ectoparasite resistance.
Their most interesting feature, however, is their guts.[1] Nenue have a unique digestive system that allows them to graze on macroalgae. They subsist on seaweeds by using fermentation in the gut to break down the complex carbohydrates of limu. Several rounds of grow-out trials with juveniles have shown that they can thrive on diets based on aquatic plant material as well as corn and wheat. Herbivory precludes the need for wild-caught forage fish – reducing the overall ecological footprint – and perhaps renders them better suited to small-scale fish farming in less-developed countries.
Hand-model displaying juvenile Kyphosus vaigiensis, also known at this stage as nenuito.
26 day-old Kyphosus vaigiensis learning their numbers.
Between ready acclimation to captivity, routine marine fish larval rearing, parasite resistance, and a broad plant-based diet, this fish has all the trappings of success in sustainable aquaculture. And it yields poke-quality meat to boot!
At Kampachi Farms we believe that seafood is healthier for people and healthier for the planet, compared to other types of meat. But one should always strive for improvement: we can improve seafood sustainability by diversifying what we eat and prioritizing low-trophic species in this diversification. Legions of researchers are pursuing plant-based and alternative proteins that can suitably nourish those carnivorous fish the market so demands – a noble pursuit, yet an admittedly roundabout way to produce ‘low trophic’ species. The more direct way, the simpler way, is to culture natural marine herbivores. Not all marine herbivores are suited for the dinner table. And market favorites – such as ahi, snappers, and our King Kampachi – are all beautiful food fish in their own right. However, if even a fraction of the restaurants selling salmon and ahi poke bowls today also offered nenue grown on herbivorous diets, the seas would be that much better for it.
A flippin’ cute nenuito !
References
Dixon, Vince. 2016. Data Dive: Tracking the Poke Trend. www.eater.com. Citing FourSquare.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 2018. American seafood industry steadily increases its footprint. www.noaa.gov.
Ulukua: The Hawaiian Electronic Library. 2019. Native use of fish in Hawaii. Mok. 2 Descriptive list of Hawaiian fishes (‘Ao’ao 56-163).
In-text links to…
https://oceana.org/blog/eating-seafood-can-reduce-your-carbon-footprint-some-fish-are-better-others
https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2018/02/01/jellyfish-if-you-cant-beat-them-eat-them
http://www.hawaiifishingnews.com/records.cfm
[1] Stay tuned for future blog posts about our imminent research on the kyphosid gut microbiome and its potential application to biofuel production.