Oceanic Team Reaps Record Shrimp Crop

Wednesday - July 11, 2007
By Lisa Asato
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Hawaii Pacific University intern Michael Davis and Oceanic Institute research assistants Larren Tang and Kathy Bowman prepare a shipment of harvested shrimp for distribution. Photo from Hawaii Pacific University.
Hawaii Pacific University intern Michael Davis and Oceanic
Institute research assistants Larren Tang and Kathy
Bowman prepare a shipment of harvested shrimp for
distribution. Photo from Hawaii Pacific University.

A new type of aquaculture technique developed by Oceanic Institute researchers has produced a bumper crop of shrimp.

The biosecure shrimp production system produced about 8,000 pounds of shrimp over 14 weeks in a pond measuring .08 acres, or smaller than the size of a baseball infield.

“What’s exciting about this particular harvest is the incredible amount of shrimp we’re harvesting in such a small space,“said Shaun Moss, director of the institute’s shrimp department.


The higher-than-normal numbers, he said, resulted from stocking the pond with 830 shrimp per 3-foot-square, which is 10 times the stocking number in typical U.S. shrimp farms. That was possible, he said, because the shrimp were “selectively bred over many, many generations to grow well and survive well” under the system’s conditions.

The majority of the harvest is being sold locally to offset research costs and some is being donated to Waimanalo Health Center and the Job Corps in Waianae.

“Most groups receiving food from Waimanalo Health Center aren’t able to get things like fresh shrimp so this is a big boon for them,” said Gary Karr of Oceanic, a Makapuu-based nonprofit research organization and an affiliate of Hawaii Pacific University.

Karr said the harvest, completed Thursday, yielded about 22 to 24 pounds per 3-foot-square, while past harvests produced about 13 to 17 pounds for the same volume.

“It just blows them out of the water,” he said.

About 16 OI researchers and three HPU interns worked on the project, which was funded by the U.S. Agriculture and Commerce departments.

Moss, the director, said other highlights of the system include that it: protects the coastline by releasing “very limited discharge”; protects the shrimp by eliminating the introduction of shrimp pathogens that cause disease; and is self-contained, which would allow it to be placed anywhere in the United States, even away from coastlines.


“We can actually put these systems in Chicago or New York or L.A. near markets - that’s our hopes for these systems that they’ll be picked up by private companies and built and managed in the Mainland or Hawaii near markets,” he said, adding that per capita every American eats about 4.2 pounds of shrimp a year.

“There’s a huge domestic demand for shrimp but very little domestic supply, so we have to import most of the shrimp that we eat,” he said. “That creates a huge federal deficit to the tune of $3 billion a year. This technology will hopefully catalyze the domestic shrimp farming industry where we can meet our domestic demand through our domestic supply.”

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