A new purpose-built laboratory at Cawthron Aquaculture Park near Nelson, has further boosted a long-term research programme to breed Pacific oysters resilient to a virus that devastated New Zealand’s oyster industry three years ago.
Scientists at Cawthron Institute, together with industry partners, have been working towards breeding Pacific oysters resilient to the ostreid herpes (OsHV-1) since the virus hit in 2010, almost wiping out the country’s Pacific oyster stocks.
“This year we’ve boosted our existing facilities to include a laboratory dedicated solely to oyster virus research,” Cawthron’s Cultured Shellfish Programme Leader Nick King says. “This facility will allow our team of scientists working on the programme to have a dedicated space for investigating both survival and growth of our oyster families, so we can identify the best performers to make available for industry for production in 2015.”
“The combination of the high-level research and scientific expertise residing at Cawthron, and the pragmatic farming and product knowledge brought by the Pacific oyster industry, has enabled a good start in the journey towards breeding and growing an oyster with a significant degree of resilience to the virus,” Pacific Marine Farms General Manager, Don Collier, says. “We are hopeful that by the end of 2014 some concrete progress towards that objective will become apparent.”
Nick King says the second generation of healthy oysters from the breeding programme will be dispatched on to farms in the Northland area in the New Year, “and we’ll be measuring their success throughout 2014”.
