Acronym NA
Category
Aquaculture
Title Experimental production of natural zooplankton and the quality of stored eggs Programme National Programme
Instrument (FP6)
Contact Type (FP7)
Strand (Interreg)
NA
Theme (FP7)
Activity Area (FP6)
Regional Area (Interreg)
Action (COST)
NA
Specific Programme (FP7)
NA
Funding source National Coordinator Jonina Johannsdottir Coordinator email jonina.johannsdottir@matis.is
Coordinator institution
MATIS - Matis Ltd (Iceland)
Institutions involved
NA
Start year 2009 End year 2010 Funding (€) € 75,000 Website https://www.matis.is/media/matis/utgafa/02-10-Dyrasvif.pdf Summary "Zooplankton is the food source of our fish stocks, with Calanus finmarchicus being the most abundant species in the marine ecosystem around Iceland in addition to Acartia that may be found in the zooplankton throughout the year. The overall goal of this project was to culture natural zooplankton species (Calanus finmarchicus and Acartia) for production of eggs that is the basis for commercial production of copepods.
Facilities for culturing zooplanktonic species and live algae have been set up as a part of the project. Natural zooplankton has been collected using various approach and attempts have been made to culture copepods under various conditions. Eggs of Acartia tonsa have furthermore been hatched and cultured in two separate experiments.
The main results indicate that zooplankton species are extremely sensitive to handling and temperature changes during collection and trasnport. Significant losses were observed during the first days following collection and the copepod cultures only survived through a few weeks. Previous studies show that nutrition profoundly affects reproduction, survival and productivity of zooplankton species. The present results indicate that the algae paste used did not fulfil the nutritional requirements of the copepods but improved results were achieved using live algae cultures. Hatching of dormant eggs proved successful and eggs
have been collected from the experimental units. Further experiments are planned with the aim to study the effects of nutrition, food supply and copepod densities on the development, sex ratio and productivity of the cultures."
Keywords
Larval rearing;
Krill;
Zooplankton;
Aquaculture development;
Marine Region
36
Iceland Grounds (27.Va)
1
Marine Region Map
