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PROJECT NUMBER • 2005-231
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

A scoping study on the Australian abalone industry

The Australian abalone industry identified a clear need to conduct research into this area to gain knowledge, but also because there has never been such a comprehensive investigation into the Australian abalone industry, its markets, global production, abalone consumption and consumption trends and...
ORGANISATION:
Abalone Council Australia Ltd (ACA)

Identification workshop of marine invasive worm species. Such worms impact on the oyster industry, and other aquaculture activities as well changing benthic habitats which can impact on wild stocks

Project number: 2013-402
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure: $10,000.00
Principal Investigator: Pat Hutchings
Organisation: Australian Museum
Project start/end date: 30 Jun 2013 - 30 Nov 2013
Contact:
FRDC

Need

Every year large numbers of exotic marine species are accidently introduced into Australian waters as a result of vessel fouling, ballast water release, aquarium trade, or through aquaculture associated stock movement. Although the majority of exotics do not establish viable populations, over 250 aquatic invasives have become notorious pests (www.marinepests.gov.au) that have significant direct economic impact on aquaculture and fisheries industries. Indirect impact include blocking industrial water intake and outlet pipes, fouling of commercial and recreational vessels as well as modifying natural ecosystems by competing for food and space with indigenous species. The costs to industry, government, and the environment are significant and ongoing. The best prevention of pest spread is their early recognition and eradication by field workers, as once established eradication is almost impossible. This, however, entails the correct initial identification of the species. Because many exotic species closely resemble native species, it is critical to distinguish between native and introduced species that already occur here as well as to recognise new introductions. Training of stakeholders to recognise introductions and develop working relationships with the relevant taxonomic experts is critical so that this can be ongoing, which will facilitate early detection and development of emergency management strategies. The workshop attendees will be shown how to collect and preserve worms in order to be able to identify them and which characters are critical to examine. This will involve hands on experience in identification of potential pests and plenty of opportunities for face to face contact and informal communication with established experts in the field to develop relevant skills. Each participant will receive a fully-illustrated guide to facilitate identifications in the work place. The guide will contain previously unpublished data and will continually be updated as new information becomes available, also for sale to non-workshop participants.

Objectives

1. To host an identification workshop for oyster farmers, consultants, port authorities, quarantine and fisheries managers to teach them how to recognise marine pests.
2. To increase the awareness of new potential introductions
3. To highlight the problem of diversity and impacts of invasive marine worm species which could become pests.
4. To establish collaborative working relationships between participants and relevant Australian and international experts.
5. To test and update the guide to native and invasive potential pest worms currently being developed

Testing established methods of early prediction of genetic merit in abalone broodstock

Project number: 2017-220
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure: $85,422.00
Principal Investigator: Jan Strugnell
Organisation: James Cook University (JCU)
Project start/end date: 3 Jun 2018 - 30 Dec 2020
Contact:
FRDC

Need

There is a need in the abalone industry to improve production animals. However, abalone are relatively slow growing animals and take several years to reach harvest size. This means that during the establishment of foundation broodstock populations it may be several years before the relative genetic merit of each of the broodstock can be determined and the first selection decisions made. During this time, the hatchery manager will have to blindly spawn broodstock to stock the farm, often with broodstock possessing poor gEBV and that produce slow growing animals. This comes at the additional cost of not being able to cull poor performing broodstock early in the establishment of the population and replacing them with new broodstock.

Through measuring the family performance (and thus broodstock gEBV) of these cellular traits in larvae and comparing broodstock gEBV with those derived from progeny at harvest, a high genetic correlation would indicate that it is possible to predict genetic merit using these cellular traits. Studies have shown that the ratio between RNA and DNA in cells has a high heritability (necessary for the traits to have predictive power) and that it can be used to accurately predict the gEBV of barramundi broodstock without the necessity of rearing progeny all the way through to harvest (genetic correlation >0.8). Therefore, using RNA/DNA as the trait to measure in barramundi larvae it is now possible to establish high performing broodstock foundation populations via mass-spawning broodstock, estimating their genetic merit based on larvae RNA/DNA, and then eliminating those broodstock with inferior gEBV from the breeding population.

Several Australian barramundi hatcheries now apply this technique to assist in the selection of broodstock. This method is as yet untested in abalone, but if successful, has great potential in helping screen broodstock. This project will test the efficacy of this early prediction method in abalone. The impact of this early detection method would be to save costs by assisting in the selection of superior broodstock individuals which would produce faster growing offspring. Currently new broodstock animals are unevaluated with regard to their genetic merit.

Objectives

1. Assess the utility of RNA/DNA ratio as a method for early prediction of high performing abalone broodstock

Final report

ISBN: 978-0-6454198-2-5
Authors: Phoebe Arbon Dean Jerry Jan M. Strugnell
Final Report • 2022-05-01 • 2.99 MB
2017-220 DLD.pdf

Summary

This report provides an assessment of the utility of RNA/DNA ratio as a method for early prediction of high performing abalone broodstock. The study was carried out on farmed Greenlip Abalone (Haliotis laevigata) whereby families were produced and resulting progeny were reared using commercial protocols. RNA/DNA ratio and shell length were measured in post larvae, and shell length, shell width and total weight were measured in juveniles and harvest sized individuals. All individuals were genotyped, parentage was assigned and heritability and genetic correlation of traits was calculated. Analyses in post-larvae and juveniles could not estimate heritability of traits including RNA:DNA and shell length indicating that the additive genetic variance component of these traits were unable to be separated from non-genetic components (e.g., environment) at early production stages (i.e. post-larvae and juveniles). This indicates that further grow out would be required to assess broodstock quality for use in breeding programs. The project was carried out between 2019-2022 by Phoebe Arbon, under the supervision of Prof. Jan Strugnell and Prof. Dean Jerry, based within the Department of Aquaculture at James Cook University, Australia.
There was no detectible heritability of post-larval traits including RNA:DNA and shell length. Therefore, the genetic potential of broodstock was not able to be predicted using progeny performance at the earlier life stages (i.e., post larvae or juveniles). This is likely to be due to a strong influence of environmental factors at early life stages. At harvest size, however, all production traits (shell length, width and animal weight) had a significant additive genetic component. Therefore, realisation of a genetic effect only occurred in the later harvest stage of production and was masked at the earlier stages of production (i.e., post-larvae and juvenile stages).
The implications of this study are that grow out of progeny to harvest size (or close to) is currently still required to determine the genetic merit of abalone broodstock in selective breeding programs. Furthermore, future studies following the same individuals in a cohort through time are required to better understand the result that the genetic effect is only realised at the harvest stage. This work is required to better inform current grading practices. Furthermore, a moderate heritability for growth traits was detected and so there is also potential for farmers to improve growth of stock through selection.

Testing abalone empirical harvest strategies, for setting TACs and associated LMLs, that include the use of novel spatially explicit performance measures

Project number: 2013-200
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure: $185,630.40
Principal Investigator: Malcolm Haddon
Organisation: CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
Project start/end date: 1 Sep 2013 - 31 Aug 2015
Contact:
FRDC

Need

Recent declines in Eastern Tasmania (Tarbath & Gardner, 2012) and Tiparra Reef in South Australia (Chick & Mayfield, 2012) suggest a potential for changes in productivity. Further challenges to successfully managing abalone include periods of poor recruitment in some areas, rising Australian east coast temperatures, the Victorian virus outbreak, toxic blooms in Tasmania, and mortality events in Tasmania.

All these challenges to current management indicate the need for more detailed and rapidly reactive and defensible management of Australian abalone stocks.

The management strategy evaluation (MSE) framework from FRDC 2007/020 “Biological Performance Indicators for abalone fisheries”, focussed on the utility of classical performance measures. However, the Multi-Criterion-Decision-Analysis Harvest Strategy (MCDA-HS) being developed in Tasmania will integrate classic fishery Performance Measures (PMs) with new Spatial PMs, and include local complexity in growth (the latter are important for the TAC/LML debate). Now GPS data loggers have become compulsory within the Tasmanian fishery (2006/029 – “Using GPS technology to improve fishery-dependent data collection in abalone fisheries”), the need to test these new empirical harvest strategies, that include spatial PMs, is becoming urgent. The MSE framework, therefore needs modification to successfully simulate the new spatial performance measures and then test the performance of the novel harvest strategies. South Australia introduced a non-spatial MCDA-HS without testing and an array of unintended consequences is becoming apparent. To retain confidence in the application of formal harvest strategies with associated decision rules testing the harvest strategies as they are developed remains important.

Novel harvest Strategies need to be tested to determine by how much they improve the setting of TACs and associated LMLs. There is a recognized need to interact with FRDC 2011/201: “Implementing a spatial assessment and decision process to improve fishery management outcomes using geo-referenced diver data” so both projects can benefit from each other.

Objectives

1. Review objectives and logic of having and setting Legal Minimum Lengths in abalone fisheries and how these interact with TAC levels.
2. Conduct Manager/Industry workshops to inform, identify issues, and to select LML/TAC scenarios within particular harvest strategies for testing by Management Strategy Evaluation..
3. Develop new modules for the present Abalone MSE Framework for testing LML/TAC harvest strategies containing multiple empirical performance measures (MCDA) that use spatially explicit PMs.
4. Use the modified MSE framework to test new Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Abalone Harvest Strategy under development in FRDC 2011/201.

Final report

ISBN: 978-1-4863-0731-9
Author: Malcolm Haddon and Craig Mundy
Final Report • 2017-10-01 • 3.78 MB
2013-200-DLD.pdf

Summary

The management of abalone stocks is difficult for many reasons including their high value and the exceptional levels of spatial structuring found in their stocks. In Tasmania, for example, suggestions to change such things as a legal minimum length or introduce a formal harvest strategy to replace the current relatively informal process, always engender high levels of sometimes heated debate. An aim of this work, conducted by Malcolm Haddon and Craig Mundy of CSIRO and the University of Tasmania respectively, was to formally examine the implications of changing legal minimum lengths and the importance of such LML to the management of abalone. This was in the context of using management strategy evaluation to test alternative potential harvest strategies for use, in the first place, within the Tasmanian abalone fisheries. With the advent and growth of more public scrutiny of wild fisheries a need for a more defensible, repeatable, and publically available process for setting abalone TACs had become urgent. This project aimed to contribute to the development of such formal harvest strategies that would both successfully generate workable management advice and be defensible under anyone’s scrutiny.

Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 2009-038
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Aboriginal fisheries in New South Wales: determining catch, cultural significance of species and traditional fishing knowledge needs

This report presents the results of a Fisheries Research Development Corporation (FRDC) funded study of Aboriginal fisheries in New South Wales. A key objective of the study was to address information gaps in relation to catch, cultural significance of species and traditional fishing knowledge (TFK)...
ORGANISATION:
Southern Cross University (SCU) Lismore Campus
Industry
PROJECT NUMBER • 2019-084
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Seafood Marketing Symposium 2020

The Queensland Seafood Marketing Association (QMSA) produced a series of 8 Webinars with the focus on seafood marketing information. This was to coincide with the launch of Great Australian Seafood television campaign in late 2020, empowering industry to to take advantage of this campaign and apply...
ORGANISATION:
Queensland Seafood Marketers Association Inc (QSMA)
Industry
PROJECT NUMBER • 2010-704
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Seafood CRC: maximising value by reducing stress-related mortality in wild harvested abalone

The Abalone Council of Australia (ACA) has clearly identified in their Strategic Plan (2007-2017) goals to have an Australian national wild abalone brand driven by a national Quality Assurance and Product Integrity Program, and to increase the industry gross volume of production (in real terms) by...
ORGANISATION:
University of Tasmania (UTAS)
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