Commercial Ceph culturing

[Major Mess]

Hello everybody

I didn´t know, where to put this question exactly , hope it won´t mess up this Topic...

I wanted to know, if anybody knows about Cephalopods in Aquaculture or Mariculture. Is it already possible to raise them in economical amounts?
I think there is a huge market for cephs in Asia, and because conventional fisheries are getting more and more in trouble, farming would be a good purpose.

Does anybody know, how Cephs are raised for "private" purpose, means aquarians?
Maybe you know some Web pages, adresses or so, where some research can be done

Greetings
Jonas

 

[gjbarord]

The National Resource Center for Cephalopods cultures cephalopods for both research and aquaria. www.nrcc.utmb.edu

I believe that there are some large scale aquaculture facilities in the Orient but I am not sure of any specifics.

Greg

 

[Opcn]

The NRCC is for research only unless some laws changed. They are run with grants for research purposes, money from those grants cannot go to subsidize the non-research hobby purposes that aquarists represent

 

[Thales]

Depends on how you define research. NRCC also supplies cephs to AZA approved public aquariums.

 

[marinebio_guy]

The NRCC is the largest facility for culturing Cephs as far as I know which are used for educational and research purposes. There are no commercial facilities. The only reason that the NRCC can do it is because they are given money to do it by the government and due to the location they have access to a lot of free food. The reason no one else can do it is its to expensive. One adult cuttlefish from the NRCC costs ~$60-80 and they are not making money at this price. So unless people are willing to pay $30-40 per pound you will not see a commercial aquaculture. The only species that is being looked at for commercial aquaculture is octopus mainly in Spain but I don't think it will be economical to do it anytime soon.

 

[Major Mess]

Hello

Yepp, the NRCC was the only facility raising Cephs I knew too.

But I wonder why it is so difficult (and expensive) to raise them for comemrcial purpose? I mean they raise Tiger Prawns and White Leg Shrimps, which both indeed are hard to rear.

Im just curious, lot of research is done, a lot of people are eating this animal (at least in Asia), but i cant find any information about aquaculturing / mariculturing of Cephs.

As far i´ve never tried to keep some Cephs myself, i wonder what the main problems could be, to raise them?
Mating?
Breeding?
Hatching?
Or maybe raising them form early juvenile stages to adult?

Greetings and thanks for your replies!

 

[mosthated]

feeding them can be costly... they dont eat grass like cows, they eat crabs and snails.. which can be costly.. only real problem i see, and the fact you only get one hatching from each adult.

 

[tonmo]

I had looked into coordinating this as a middleman / storefront -- I don't keep tanks of any kind, but I had worked with a gentleman named George for a while where I stood up an ecommerce site (shrimpstuff.com, now defunct) to sell his live aquacultured shrimp, direct shipped to your home. Through this site (TONMO.com) we had started up discussions about purchasing bimac eggs and working with George to have him aquaculture them and sell them through this site. It never got off the ground -- the eggs were expensive, feeding logistics were difficult, and the shipping model seemed difficult as well. By all accounts, it's a difficult business model.

 

[marinebio_guy]

Food is probably the main problem as they need live food trough at least part of there life. Octopus tend to be cannibalistic which is problem. Cuttlefish aren't cannibalistic but the densities you can keep them at is far less then shrimp or fish so you would need a very large facility. Water quality has to be very good (better than what fish are kept at). Breeding is not a problem but each female will only lay a few hundred or thounsand eggs at best so you would have to have good juv. survival. Most shrimp/fish lay tens of thousands to millions of eggs so juv. survival is not as big a problem. As I said ealier the cost of live food is the main problem. The going price for squi/octopus/cuttlefish is maybe $1-2 per pound there is no way you can culture them and compete with that price.