Offshore and Multi-Use Aquaculture with Extractive Species: Seaweeds and Bivalves

Aquaculture of extractive species, such as bivalves and macroalgae, already supplies a large amount of the production consumed worldwide, and further production is steadily increasing. Moving aquaculture operations off the coast as well as combining various uses at one site, commonly called multi-use aquaculture, is still in its infancy. Various projects worldwide, pioneered in Germany and later accompanied by other European projects, such as in Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, as well as other international projects in the Republic of Korea and the USA, to name a few, started to invest in robust technologies and to investigate in system design needed that species can be farmed to market size in high energy environments. There are a few running enterprises with extractive species offshore, however, multi-use scenarios as well as offshore IMTA concepts are still on project scale. This will change soon as the demand is dramatically increasing and space is limited. B.H. Buck (&) Marine Aquaculture, Maritime Technologies and ICZM, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Bussestrasse 27, 27570 Bremerhaven, Germany e-mail: [email protected] B.H. Buck Applied Marine Biology, University of Applied Sciences Bremerhaven, An der Karlstadt 8, 27568 Bremerhaven, Germany N. Nevejan M. Wille Laboratory of Aquaculture & Artemia Reference Center, Department of Animal Production, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Campus Coupure F, Coupure Links 653, 9000 Ghent, Belgium M.D. Chambers School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering, University of New Hampshire, Morse Hall, Room 164, Durham, NH, USA T. Chopin Canadian Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture Network, University of New Brunswick, 100 Tucker Park Road, Saint John, NB E2L 4L5, Canada © The Author(s) 2017 B.H. Buck and R. Langan (eds.), Aquaculture Perspective of Multi-Use Sites in the Open Ocean, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51159-7_2 23 2.1 Sustainable Aquaculture The development of sustainable aquaculture is aimed at insuring that commercial aquaculture has minimal adverse effects on the environment. One way to achieve this goal is through the development of improved methods of waste management for land based, coastal and offshore aquaculture by combining extractive and fed aquaculture, also referred to as integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) systems. Fish excrete nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and carbon (C) (Beveridge 1987; Mugg et al. 2000; Neori et al. 2004, 2007; Corey et al. 2014). Nearly 50 kg N and 7 kg P can be released per ton of finfish produced per year (Chopin et al. 1999; Kautsky et al. 1999; Troell et al. 2003; Kim et al. 2013). In coastal waters, high levels of these nutrients can trigger harmful microalgal blooms (red tides) and contribute to excessive growth of nuisance or opportunistic macroalgae (green and brown tides), which in turn have negative consequences on coastal ecosystems and economies. These nutrients could instead be used to support the growth of economically important seaweeds, which would compete for nutrients with nuisance species, especially in nearshore coastal environments, hence mitigating these potentially adverse environmental impacts (Neori et al. 2004, 2007; Chopin et al. 2008; Pereira and Yarish 2008; Abreu et al. 2009, 2011b; Buschamnn et al. 2008; Corey et al. 2012, 2014; Kim et al. 2013, 2014a, 2015a). Seaweeds take up N, P and C, which they use for growth and production of proteins and energy storage products (mostly carbohydrates). When seaweeds are harvested from IMTA or nutrient bio-extraction systems, the nutrients are also removed from the environment. Seaweeds can then be used on for bio-based, high-valued compounds for human consumption, protein sources in finfish aquaculture diets, sources of phycocolloids, cosmeceuticals, nutraceuticals and other biochemicals, and for low-value commodity energy compounds such as biofuels, biodiesels, biogases and bioalcohols (Horn et al. 2000; Smit 2004; Chopin et al. 2011; Cornish and Garbary 2010; Gellenbeck 2012; Kim 2011). Integration of shellfish with cage culture of fish can also help to reduce the risk of eutrophication since the particulate organic matter (POM) produced by fish (wasted feed and faeces) and the increased plankton production serve as excellent feed and are filtered out by these organisms. Faster growth (between 30 and 40% greater) of bivalves near fish cages has been reported with contributions of fish feed and fish faeces varying between 5–28% and 4–35%, respectively (Wallace 1980; Jones and Iwama 1991; Stirling and Okomus 1995; Buschmann et al. 2000; Lefebvre et al. 2000; Lander et al. 2004; Peharda et al. 2007; Chopin et al. 2008; Sara et al. 2009; Handå et al. 2012; Jiang et al. 2013; Dong et al. 2013). Other studies, however, did not observe a difference in growth near fish cages (Mazzola and Sara 2001; Navarrete-Mier et al. 2010). Several explanations for these contradicting results have been given by e.g. Troell and Norberg (1998), Troell et al. (2011), Handå (2012) and Reid et al. (2013): (1) the POM generated by the fish culture doesn’t increase the seston concentration significantly due to dilution; 24 B.H. Buck et al.