Designer mussels in melting pot

Scientists at Nelson's Cawthron Institute have developed technology tipped to revolutionise the mussel industry and could soon be applied to other shellfish.

They have come up with techniques for selectively breeding mussels that will enable mussel farmers to grow better mussels faster.

The scientists have been working on the techniques, similar to those carried out with farmed crops and animals, for eight years.

Cawthron's aquaculture group manager Henry Kaspar said the development was exciting and would mean that over the next 20 years mussel farmers would be able to double mussel growth rates.

They would also be able to produce more uniform mussels, and breed mussels with certain characteristics, to suit specific markets.

Kaspar said the selective breeding programme involved choosing mussel "parents" based on individual and sibling performance and producing seed mussels or spat from them, which were then on-grown in mussel farms.

The idea was to work with 50 to 60 mussel "families" a year, each consisting of thousands of mussels.

Trial families had been put in two mussel farms in the Marlborough Sounds to grow since the beginning of the year, he said. In a year to 18 months, the growth of the mussels could be compared.

Kaspar said controlled spat production was a huge benefit for mussel farmers, who had relied on wild spat until now.

The problem with the wild spat is that its volume can fluctuate and it can sometimes be affected by toxic algal blooms.

Kaspar said that at present mussel farmers were happy if two wild spat out of 100 survived to grow to mussels, odds that could be improved significantly with selective breeding.

The project has been carried out at the Glenhaven Aquaculture Centre and has received $5 million from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology in the past five years.

It was unveiled publicly on Saturday by the Minister of Research, Science and Technology, Pete Hodgson.

- NZPA