Professional Skipper Magazine from VIP Publications

S93 May-Jun 2013 with NZ Aquaculture

The only specialised marine publication in Oceania that focuses on the maritime industry, from super yachts to small craft to large commercial ships, including coastal shipping, tugs, tow boats, barges, ferries, tourist, sport-fishing craft

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End of culture AT MAHANGA BAY NIWA CLOSES ITS AQUACULTURE RESEARCH CENTRE BY BOB HICKMAN long and significant chapter in the story of aquaculture in New Zealand ended early this year with the closure by the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere of its Mahanga Bay Aquaculture Research Centre. Originally known as The Mahanga Bay Hatchery or The Shellfish Hatchery when it became operational in 1975, the site was already in use by Fisheries Research Division scientists as one of the experimental stations in a nationwide study of the potential for farming mussels in New Zealand. This work confirmed that Mahanga Bay, at the northern tip of the Miramar Peninsula in Wellington Harbour, was indeed a prime site for growing and fattening the green lipped mussel, as Perna canaliculus was called in those days before the Greenshell mussel farming industry had developed. Mahanga Bay was therefore an excellent site for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to establish a hatchery and aquarium facility to develop the necessary rearing and handling techniques for bivalve larvae and spat and to provide technical backup and advice to shellfish farmers. Mahanga Bay, as the research facility came to be known, was never a major landmark on the road around the Miramar Peninsula. Its building, which was formerly a Defence Department mine store, was largely hidden from view and only the seawater tanks were prominent. However, the research facility certainly made its mark in science as a leading source of information and technology for the development and expansion of New Zealand's aquaculture industry from the early 1970s to the present. Although the facility and its work were mainly hidden from public view, Wellingtonians became familiar over the years with the experimental equipment, including rafts, longlines and seacages used by the fisheries scientists and was moored in the Bay itself. "Past the bay with the mussel floats," was a not and infrequent direction given to taxi drivers. A 6 ■ NZ AQUACULTURE ■ MAY/JUNE 2013 During its 38 years as a research facility – initially for the Fisheries Research Division of MAF and latterly for NIWA – Mahanga Bay was involved in some aspect of virtually every aquaculture development throughout the country. For the first five or so years the work, under scientist-in-charge Peter Redfearn, concentrated on breeding and rearing commercially important shellfish, with priority to be given to rock oyster, green lipped mussel, scallop, paua, sea urchin and toheroa, and during this period some 16 bivalve species were successfully spawned and reared, many for the first time. The 1980s at Mahanga Bay were dominated, but by no means exclusively, by paua and mussel research. Len Tong had joined the research team in 1979 and his work on controlled conditioning and spawning of the black-footed paua, Haliotis iris, opened the way for commercial paua farming development. Mussel research during this period, involving scientists Peter Redfearn, Barbara Hayden and Bob Hickman, included the establishment of an experimental farm in the Bay to investigate the relationships between natural productivity and the production of farmed mussels, as well as work on Kaitaia spat (first identified as a mussel farming resource by Bob Hickman in 1974) and on conditioning of Perna canaliculus for controlled spawning. The 1980s decade also saw major improvements to the facility's systems, equipment and operations, largely implemented by long serving technical officer John Illingworth. The improvements enabled the hatchery to be supplied with adequate quantities of filtered, temperaturecontrolled seawater for the numerous species under research and for the algal culture systems required to supply their food. The 1990s saw Mahanga Bay move into finfish aquaculture research. The snapper enhancement project initially focussed on mass production of rotifers as a food for larval snapper, before progressing to the production of the larval and

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