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[music] Paul Wills: This is actually five separate
projects that I'll be talking about, so this is going to be somewhat of a manic presentation.
I'm going to be putting slides up there, and not talking about stuff on them but you guys
can all read. I assume you can all read, right? So, we'll make it through this. You can see
the team. We have a very expansive team of researchers plus a team of staff which you'll
see on the acknowledgement slide at the end but you can see from the people from Harbor
Branch you will know that we've got a bunch of biologists that specialize in all sorts
of different specialties and we have engineers working on this project as well. It's a very
integrated project. The individual SLP-funded projects are very integrated into an overall
project that we call The Umbrella Project. All right, so talking about integrated multi-trophic
aquaculture very quickly at first. There's a concept of integrative multi-trophic
aquaculture that's been applied in open ocean aquaculture whereby the wastes from fed aquaculture
is used as resource to feed other species, that being filter-feeders, detritus feeders,
plants, etcetera. There's a group of scientists that are bringing this on to land-based systems
most of them are using a linear design similar to what I'm showing here.
The thing about the linear design is it's simple, but you have to flow all of the water
from the fed culture through all the other components, which makes it difficult if you
have sensitive species and that sort of thing to effectively culture, and it also reduces
the subset of species that you can actually use within the culture. A sensitive species
is not going to be able to be applied in this system.
Here's an example of a linear system that's being used in Egypt. They're actually doing
fed-culture here, and it flows through the system and in this instance, rather than a
re-circulating back -- it's actually discharging to the open ocean which is one of the means
methods for using this type of concept. Well, in our concept, we wanted to have a
much more expansive group of species that we could look at, target sensitive species,
things like that that may be used for food, or for stock enhancement.
So, we chose to use a design with a centralized filtration system and spokes, so you have
a hub of filtration with spokes to different culture components, so here you have the fed
culture, being the fish and shrimp in this case; extractive culture for suspended solids,
being a filter feeder. In our instance, oysters was a species that we chose, extractive culture
for settleable solids, being urchins which we chose, and we're using a local species
of urchin; and then assimilative culture being the culture of seaweed in our case.
So, the design is more complex, water flow is distributed and can be put to any component
in the quantity that that component needs, which makes the system a little bit more useable.
It gives you kind of a plug-and-play mode, much more expandable, much more flexible for
design with the different species, and overall should improve the efficiency of a traditional
land-based re-circulating system because you're using these wastes now as resources instead
of discharging them. So, this is the design that we put together
for our prototype in conjunction with our engineering group. That's why we have real
nice 3-D modeling designs thanks to them. And it was very interesting as aquaculturists
know. We build from like Lego's from the group and make everything fit, but with this, this
concept is very nice, made it much speedier to do the designs to get it together, order
parts, etcetera. The other thing is we were able to do a very complex integrated computerized
control system. Now, I've done these by myself on some of
our systems, but this is a degree above what I've done myself previously and it's working
very well. Another thing that we did, one of the main
things that we knew from the beginning is how are we going to handle these solids? What
are we going to do with these solids? And the final iteration for us at this point is
a system called an ex-situ biofloc reactor. What we found, and you'll see when I talk
about the urchin component, is that the urchins don't necessarily like to eat the 'poo', we'll
call it, coming from the fish, all right? So, there's some research out there that has
shown that you can convert the 'poo' into a bacterial colony now, like yogurt, all right?
And then you use that to feed the animals. OK?
[Audience]: Great!
Paul Wills: So, what are some of the potential products? The ones that are highlighted in
dark blue are the species we're looking at. Obviously fish, multiple different species
of fed culture for fish; shrimp, either for food or for bait; and these can be done in
clean water or a biofloc culture. Of course, clean water would be very simple in this system
, so we chose to do biofloc culture because it's more difficult. Why take the easy road,
right? So, I'm going to talk about shrimp very briefly.
Here's the group that worked on that. They did three basic experiments. One was done
in replicated fashion using fish solids. What they found was that by applying fish solids,
we were actually able to get the biofloc which is a bacterial culture, and takes a lot of
time to get established in a traditional sense. But by using fish solids, we were able to
get that biofloc established much quicker and you can see that expressed by the green
line being No Fish Solids versus having Fish Solids in these lines. And the shrimp actually
grew as well regardless of which method we used.
That was not a system that was integrated into the IMTA, that was while we were developing
the system, we did that replicated experiment. So, after we had the prototype system together,
we did two actual production runs using that concept. The first experiment didn't use the
solids coming out of the system. The second experiment did use -- since it's a prototype,
there's only one tank, so we had to do an iterative kind of experiment, more of an empirical
design. But we were able to actually effectively integrate fish culture in a biofloc sense
to our IMTA which we were very happy with and we are actually running a fourth production
run right now where we're using an alternative concept to deliver the solids to the shrimp,
and it seems to be working out. We don't have data yet at this point but it seems to be
working out very well. So, on to other potential products from our
extractive cultures, we have settleable solids, the sea urchins. This is the sea urchin we're
working with, Lytechinus variegatus, and then suspended solids would be oysters, and I'm
going to get into some of the things we've done.
This is the team that has worked on that, including John and Amber, Freddie Prawl, and
an intern who did an exciting project for us. It really stimulated the direction of
our research. They used a summer intern. He's sitting right there. Very very good project.
So, on the urchin side, we were looking at the flocculation as a means of concentrating
solids so that we could get at them, and use them. We were looking at means of moving solids.
So, this shows the integration between that umbrella project and the urchin portion, and
this goes for all the components of the project -- very integrated. There's the -- that's
'poo', that's pre-yogurt, yeh! [laughter] this is actually how we collect the yogurt,
but what we found is that the dried solids -- we actually took the solids, dried them
down in a drying oven, and then attempted to feed that to the urchins to see if they
would even accept it. They did not accept it. They did not like it. This is what led
us, then, to go towards this ex-situ biofloc mode of dealing with the solids.
Now that we've got that system working very well, we're going to with our current set
of interns, we're going to start looking at that yogurt as the feed, acceptance of it,
etcetera for the urchins. Oysters, this is the study that Matt did.
We were looking at the use of fine particulates by oysters. This is his data that looked at
feeding the oysters the fish suspended solids, and then a combination of algae plus the suspended
solids, and you can see just on the suspended solids, they did not grow very well. But when
we added algae, they grew well, and if you look at this the fish-suspended 50/50 algae,
plus fish-suspended algae did not grow significantly different from just algae which you would
normally be growing oysters on, so they can use the suspended solids, but there's something
missing. And when you looked at the oysters themselves, the ones that were supplemented
were developing *** which shows that they're healthy.
So, we expanded on the work that he did for us as an intern, in the subsequent year doing
it large scale within the integrated system. These are the tanks that we operated in. We
saw that we were actually showing an increase over time, and we thought that we needed -- based
on his work, and what we were seeing -- we wanted to add microalgae. Here's some pictures
of microalgae and some funny guy looking at them. Two types of oysters we had available
to us for this study were some that were in the IMTA system for a period of time prior
to the study and then some that were kept out of the IMTA and supplementally fed with
the algae for a period. We had two treatment groups, two troughs,
etcetera, and the results showed that supplementation with algae worked, based on live weight, and
weight change of the oysters. We knew we needed to supplement the oysters
with microalgae in order to get good healthy growth, so the question then came: "Can we
integrate the growth of microalgae into the system?". We did another sub study, using
water from the IMTA in batch culture and determined that the water would support growth of algae.
Year 3 is to look at how do we integrate this in a loop or some sort of continuous batch
culture to produce algae for oyster supplementation. Assimilative culture in the macroalgae, we
were look at Ulva and Gracilaria, and if you look at assimilative culture as a whole it
can be used at two things. Produce the product directly and sell it, or produce it and use
it as feed for one of the other animals in the system. So, now you've bio-transformed
it into something much like our yogurt has been biotransformed to something to feed.
It's something in the system. So these are some results that Dennis had from previous
work out on our algae slab, an area that he does flow-through culture of algae, and he
has some data on how algae performs over the course of a year. We are collecting essentially
the same sort of data on our system to get production rates and getting tissues so we
can do nitrogen sampling. This is what our actual data on the IMTA looks like based on
production. So, we are getting a similar trend to what we saw in the flow-through culture
in our IMTA. This is theoretical data. Currently the samples
are out to get the real numbers that will replace this and basically, this information
is going to allow us to start to model how nutrients are moving throughout the system,
how much nitrogen the plants can remove, how many plants we need, etcetera based on the
weight of the fish that we're feeding. We do have problems that we're trying to address
and the results of this project have produced a lot of outreach components. Incorporation
of the concepts and in real-time what we're learning from these systems into our FAU courses,
our IRSC courses, our ACTED courses and workshops, etcetera, a presentation at the ninth International
Recirculating Aquaculture Conference which is basically we went and told them what we're
doing, so that they know we're the ones doing this concept, because this is a concept that
was developed here. The idea was developed here by our team of biologists and engineers.
We did three presentations at the World Aquaculture Society meeting this past fall and then two
presentations at Northeastern Aquaculture Conference and Exposition.
We have two Link intern projects, Matt's project and another project looking at particulates
within the system; two articles in Aquaculture Industry Press and many lay articles, so we're
getting the word out about this system and the work that we're doing.
This is the acknowledgements. You can see it's a very big group of people as well as
the scientists that are working on the project, so -- one question? All right? [applause]
One question make it a good one. Question:. [inaudible]
Paul Wills: Split among the two years, the total budget was $338,000.
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