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Diving in: White seabass is first in marine finfish revival

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USA - Seafood merchant Paul Johnson remembers seeing a picture from the 1940s of white seabass being packed like logs onto a train going to market. Prized for its tender flesh, hefty build and delicate flavor, the "king croaker," as the white seabass is often called, has long been a popular catch for commercial and sport fishermen.

[2007-03-07]
USA - Seafood merchant Paul Johnson remembers seeing a picture from the 1940s of white seabass being packed like logs onto a train going to market. Prized for its tender flesh, hefty build and delicate flavor, the "king croaker," as the white seabass is often called, has long been a popular catch for commercial and sport fishermen.
 
But when Johnson started his seafood business some 30 years ago, he was barely familiar with the white seabass. Overfishing, pollution and habitat loss had decimated its population from the 1950s through the 1980s.
 
"We would seldom see many seabass 20 or 25 years ago," said Johnson, president of the San Francisco-based Monterey Fish Market Inc. "They're now slowly coming back. We're seeing a lot more coming to market. It's always been a popular fish in California. It used to be a popular fish for many, many years and now it's going to make a comeback."
 
Once considered a rare catch in the fishery industry, the white seabass is resurging from severe depletion thanks in part to a hatchery program at Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute in Southern California. The focus of the project, known as the Ocean Resources Enhancement and Hatchery Program, is to raise the white seabass for release back into the ocean.
 
"What's primarily driving the conservation efforts is the desire to repopulate the fish enough for it to be fished for both recreational and commercial fishing interests," said Mark Drawbridge, a biologist at Hubbs-SeaWorld.
 
But the white seabass is only the first in the line of fisheries the program plans to restore. Ultimately, researchers hope to evaluate the commercial feasibility of raising a number of marine finfish from commercial aquaculture, including the California halibut, yellowtail and sheephead. While catfish, striped bass, tilapia and white sturgeon are among the most common fish grown in California, no marine finfish are commercially produced.
 
"If you can farm these animals, that will take pressure off the wild fisheries because the consumers have an alternative source," said Drawbridge.
 
At Hubbs-SeaWorld's main hatchery in Carlsbad, white seabass collected from the wild are spawned to provide eggs to grow baby fish. At about 3 months old, or when the juvenile seabass are about 3 to 4 inches in length, they are transferred to 15 different growth facilities from Santa Barbara to San Diego. The fish are released into the ocean after about nine months, or when they reach 8 to 12 inches long, big enough to survive and eventually mate in the wild. An adult fish is about 4 years old.
 
The hatchery program is the only one of its kind on the West Coast. Launched in 1982, the project is funded primarily by recreational fishing license stamps and managed by the California Department of Fish and Game.
 
"Marine finfish aquaculture is pretty unique," said Drawbridge. "It's not very common yet in the United States, so our hatchery is the only marine finfish hatchery along the whole West Coast. There are other folks who are raising abalone, and certainly people doing freshwater, but nobody else is doing marine finfish."
 
Before construction of the 22,000-square-foot facility in Carlsbad was completed in 1995, the program began as a small-scale research study on how to spawn the fish in captivity, a very difficult process because of the small and fragile nature of the larvae. Also, to provide the fish with a good diet, researchers raise live fish in separate tanks to feed the growing seabass.
 
As part of the project, each fish, prior to release, is tagged with a stainless steel wire microchip embedded in its cheek. The tags allow scientists to monitor how well the fish are surviving in the wild.
 
"We keep track of fish as they go through the system," said Drawbridge. "We know when they were born and when they were spawned. We're not quite there yet, but with some of the genetics work that we're doing, there will be a day soon when we would know who the parents are."
 
In the program's infancy, researchers were releasing several thousand tagged fish a year. These days, they're releasing several hundred thousand annually. Anglers have caught more than 1,600 tagged fish since the start of the program. Drawbridge noted that some of the fish are as old as 12 years.
 
"The chance of a fish being recaptured out of the ocean is literally a needle in a haystack," said Joe Carrillo, president of Santa Barbara Sea, a nonprofit organization that helps maintain the rearing pens in the Santa Barbara County area. "Our fish do grow very strong and healthy. The primary goal of this is, we're trying to boost the breeding stock in the ocean and use these efforts as a platform to educate the public."
 
To help Hubbs-SeaWorld retrieve the tags, fishermen are asked to save the heads of any white seabass caught off the California coast and deposit them at various drop-off locations. Fishing clubs such as the United Anglers of Southern California, whose members build and maintain net pens for the fish, are helping to spread the word.
 
"We would like to see all fisheries rebound," said Tom Raftican, president of the association. "The population of California is 36 million and climbing every day. To simply expect to go to the ocean and extract more from it?you can't have a one-way street there. We have to be able to put back more than we take out if we expect a viable ocean in the future, and aquaculture will play a key role in this."
 
According to the 2005 Census of Aquaculture by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. sales of aquaculture products grew from $978 million in 1998 to nearly $1.1 billion in 2005. Total California sales in 2005 were $69.6 million, of which $36.9 million was in food fish. While these numbers indicate the nation's aquaculture business is booming, Drawbridge said the United States is still "behind the curve a bit."
 
"We import the majority of our seafood," he said. "If you look at historical catches of captured fisheries over the last 20 years, it's basically a flat line. So what it's telling us is that we're harvesting natural stocks at a maximum level. If you look at those trends, then clearly there's a need to start farming these species."
 
So far, nobody has jumped in to try to raise marine finfish commercially in California. One reason may be the state's regulatory environment for aquaculture is still murky.
 
"Now, with that said, there's a lot of interest," Drawbridge said. "There are some commercial fishermen down here who really see the writing on the wall in terms of where their industry is going and they're interested in it. But they're kind of waiting."
 
Source: cfbf.com

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