COSS Panel 1: The Abundant Oyster

good morning everyone hear me than I'm Steve Patterson with soul Royers let's get things kicked off here um as Tanner just alluded to U we all have a as partners together we all mutually have a goal of 10 billion oysters so it's appropriate our first panel here is focusing on increasing yields I'm with a company called solar oysters LLC this is a partnership between two companies ecologics group and Maritime Applied Physics Corporation uh what I'm going to discuss today is truly a team effort um see the members of our team there of of not I want to point out Mark rice who's the president and the inventor of President of MPC and the inventor of this technology which is shown on the right there some of you may recognize this speci it's the Patricia Campbell CBF Patricia Campbell and on the other side of the dock there is what we call the solar oyer production system this is a floating high density uh automated using solar energy uh oyer production ction system that particular platform is 40 by 25 ft go to the next slide um this is what it looks like it's a uh again a high uh production oyer production system could be used for agriculture Farmers or for restoration the concept here is that baskets are suspended as shown here vertically in the water column and what this does it enables the oyers to be exposed obviously to differing levels of food availability solinity o and the ladder as we call them you'll see five here on which the baskets are attached this particular version again this is the working prototype we have it's located in the bore Harbor that can accommodate 575 baskets and what we're doing this past year was a very exciting year for us uh again we built and launched this last fall we're very excited about the partnership we have with CBF uh we are helping them with our oer gardening effort in the Baltimore Harbor we accepted uh that previous photo showed that we were accepting spat on shell on October 21st of last year and we have been growing up uh this this past growing season um again this particular platform is shown uh it's designed to be at a water depth of about 20 fet you could obviously U have fewer baskets on it and accommodate in shallower water we estimate this particular version could grow upwards of 200,000 oysters from sea um next slide so just to show you some of the some of the actual results we've learned quite a bit this year um we did uh in addition to this bat on shell that I mentioned we did purchase some seed uh last September at about 6 millimeters inside that photo in size that photo to the left is actually taken last October and you can see um can't see the dates on the bottom there but uh uh the middle photo is August and the photo to the right is is uh just taken just a couple of weeks ago um so there's a nice deep cup obviously on those um they're about 2 in in size so far and we will continue uh continue growing next year we're continuing our goal as a company is to be a provider of technology to Growers to those in the restoration business to be able to grow Oysters next slide and here's some spat on shell again uh these were taken uh the one to the left I think that was so turn at the top they're all taken in August but uh we've had pretty I think it's heard to say robust growth with a spaton shell what we'll be doing here um looks like probably early November in coordination with CBF uh we'll be offloading This Bat on shell to be taken to a reef at the mouth of Baltimore Harbor for those familiar with that area uh Reef near Fort Carroll uh again to help replenish the the population there and at the same time we'll be accepting additional SP on shell for growth next year next slide again uh this past year it's all about trying to validate or prove this technology so we're doing uh a variety of different experiments um and what I'm showing here is uh again we have one ladder that we've kept static in other words it's not rotating um and what we're showing here after one week you can see the boping on the static ladder to the right and to the left is ladder that was rotating um through the water column there was no pressure washing but it simply shows less boping through exposing the baskets again when they're above the water column exposed to sunlight and UV rays and it does help with a desiccation of the boping so we're continuing to do some some experiments and research in fact a little bit later in the lightning route the student uh darl AER Carter from UNBC is in the lightning round he's been doing research as part of his master's program for throughout this summer and through through next month actually so uh his research has been very helpful for us next slide so um and this is Emily Caffrey Emily is our platform manager she does a fantastic job and um we've learned a lot this past year um these are sea baskets uh we did learn early on that we needed to come up with a different mechanism to attach the baskets to the to what we call the ladder um you know it's apply you could say kind of almost a violent action when the the baskets flip at the top and unfortunately we we experienced a few baskets becoming detached which isn't a good thing but we worked and that is not in any way intended to be a reflection or a poor commentary on sea they're great to work with uh we came up with a new design for the the attachment mechanism uh it took us a while to get them in with supply chain issues but nevertheless we got them in and after we had that we were able to do the sequential rotation that I had mentioned um we did uh experience some mechanical problems with one or two ladders which we've since resolved um and uh again uh as shown here in the bullets survivability has been has been very good uh we had is I think for those in this part of the country we all experienced in Late July early August some pretty hot weather um admittedly this is not the ideal location to grow oysters so we had very low potentially do levels at some point they were around one or less than one and I think showing this rotation through the water column really help decrease any mortality um so the isues are still growing uh we still need to do some more research we'll do that again through next year and again our goal ultimately is to bring this kind of a technology to the market again for those in the restoration business or certainly for agriculture Growers so um I think that's my last slide there maybe one more um so this is again a technology to potentially could take again for oyer agriculture from what shown the left there traditional float Farm to something is shown on the right that particular version I know you can't see it in full but it's a that's a concept of a larger 90 by 56t platform that um would accommodate potentially in our design uh and we'd have enough power I should have pointed out that solar energy has enough energy to be able to power navigation lining any surveillance equipment uh to you know divert any pushing problems uh we could even uh power up wellers or sorting equipment on board um or if we need to put on the you know oxy oxygenation equipment or water quality monitoring equipment could all be powered by the solar energy so um that's it I just wanted to kick off our panel today with that kind of a technology slant um and with that get to Dr Walton right sounds good should should I stay here whatever whatever you prefer on you get yeah you get a better shot okay thank you so yes my name is Bill Walton I'm with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and um I'm going to talk to you a little bit about improving production in Oyster aquaculture and that I wanted to leave time for uh I'm not going to go very deep into any uh of this I wanted to give you the overview because to me I wanted to leave time for some of this discussion and as we um as as we look at improving oyster production I wanted to take a step back and ask what is Improvement because I think from a restoration point of view and possibly a Fisheries point of view we do think about yield in fact the panel is about yield increasing our yield and so that's Survival and growth what I would argue is the solution to getting more oyster aquaculture in Chesapeake Bay means that we have to have a broader view next slide please of what is Improvement because remember an oyster farmer needs to be Thinking Beyond yield of course you need survival and growth right you can't sell something that's that's died we can't do that but I think it from the oyster aquaculture we do need to be thinking about what techniques are out there to increased quality what about increased shelf life increased consistency of that product because as many of you know in some of the marketplaces that that is what they're looking for that differs from what they might get from a a wild product and then you can even think about it in terms of the farm in terms of increased efficiency on that farm increased safety on that farm um and then maximizing Environmental and Cultural benefits and I think that's been one of the things we've seen with the alliance is this idea of bringing together the Environmental benefits of oyster aquaculture for commercial production along with what we see in the environment so again if the goal is to get more oysters in ches Bay we need commercial oyster Farmers to succeed so how do we get there and I think it means we need to think yes yield but we can't stop at yield we need to think past that next slide please so some of the current research we have going on our lab is understanding some of those tradeoffs uh among uh different growing methods so um you know unfortunately the the screen is hiding one of the cool oysters we're growing oysters in three different ways we're using traditional bottom cages and we're using floating cages and you can see um uh you can see if you can see all three Bunches of oysters um that in fact you get some very dramatic differences in terms of the sizes of the oysters and if you're on Zoom you might be able to like zoom in on those you can see substantial differences in the bof filing that are on the oysters the oysters in the upper right came out of floating cages that is how they came out of the cages those weren't scrubbed those weren't wash that's how they came out of those cages now they are smaller I'm not saying that's the solution I not putting forward here that that is the best way to grow oysters but it is a way to grow oysters and depending on what you as a grower are trying to accomplish we want you to have the best science to help guide those decisions about what you choose to do on your farm so that we do know that you can affect shell shape we know you can expect bof falling that consistency of the yield for anybody who's worked with oysters you know when you run a Dred you get a variety of stuff when you uh fill an oyster bag full of oysters and dump it out you can get a variety of sizes and shapes it turns out that there are some methods that you can use that when you dump that bag out on the calling board those oysters can be a lot closer in size um depending on the choices you make as a farmer and we are exploring this idea of shelf life and that sounds silly but I think that's one of those things that there's a lot of product or into the marketplace and there are questions about how long it lasts and and people are limiting sales based on shelf life there are things on the farm that you can do that can extend the shelf life of the oysters I think we can demonstrate that I think it's at least worth exploring next slide please um this is not vims um this is a flip farm system which we have now got a permit for a 1acre research farm at vims and so down at the Gloucester Point campus we're running a 1ac a research farm and it's not commercial but it's also not just a lab experiment anymore we're somewhere in between and what we wanted to do by setting up that farm which has a thousand baskets of flip Farm a dozen floating cages and we're trying to get a permit modification for a dozen bottom cages is to give us the ability to do research at a level that a farmer will at least recognize and make those results believable to a farmer so that they can use um and I welcome collaboration uh from Farmers or researchers that want to look at something there and so we are going to yes we're going to be doing research but we're also just going to be running props through there and evaluating things that are farmer might care about Beyond yield like efficiency ease of use um you mentioned durability of the gear and safety next slide please so I'll wrap up with when we think about improving yield I didn't put uh Hatchery and Nursery up here there is certainly room for improvement there but let's think about growout and that really goes into either off bottom containerized culture or spat on shell which is for on bottom when you think about aquaculture Julia Grant is going to speak in the lightning around about this but improving yield in the off bottoms it is clear to me that one of the most pressing issues for the industry is we need to understand spring and summer uh this unexplained mortality that we get some people call it triploid mortality the more I look at it the more I see that in diploids too it's but no farm that that no business plan can survive 70% mortality happening periodically in an unexpected way like that's we can't do that we need to solve that um and we need to be thinking about effects of climate change so Julia will talk a little bit about her project the farmer can't change the environment but the farmer can make different decisions in that environment if they know what what they're doing and how that might affect that I do think when we think about restoration and Fisheries and commercial production we need to be thinking about on bottom aquaculture where we start using um some of this spat on shell and thinking about how we make that work better and more reliably so that may be managing wases to predation and it definitely means improved site selection we need to make the return on investment more reliable so that more people are willing to do that the technology to produce fat on shell is there nobody's in a big way in Virginia at least there aren't a lot of people banking on that and we need to increase the ability to to take that risk and so um one of the tools that we're doing this at dims um you'll hear another another of our panelists talk about genetic improvements certainly the aquaculture uh program at vims is very strong in terms of genetic improvements for oysters so we need to understand that and utilize the most modern tools for that we need to understand and manage disease we need to think about the effects of sorry I can go to the next slide I forgot to mention that I push my slides forward next slide next slide sorry I forgot to say that um and then improving uh improving those um tools includes evaluating effects of habs and then some of these new technologies that are available uh to Growers whether that's gear or sensors and so with that I will wrap up I think we're taking questions and comments at the end yes very end y thank you all right very good thanks Dr W Dr thank you so I'm going to this is on okay so I'm going to deal with another type of advanc called technology which is what I'm trying to what we're trying to do refers to Oyster restoration primarily and what we're trying to do is to look at some of the advances in physics in math and other fields that are actually I think going to help this in applying uh basically these whatever advances we have voice the restoration and I do want to emphasize or one thing is that one of the primary goals and I should look at Tommy C wherever Tommy is there you go Tommy is that what we're trying to do is result in a win-win situation for restor ation industry in the fishery that is can we have situations where we can enhance restoration but then also provide subsidies in terms of Lal subsidies to Industry to Fisheries um and to Growers so just want to make sure you have that in mind that's quite a change from before where there was a lot of antagonism between restoration and Industry and I'm hoping we can sort of Turn the page so that we're all uh gaining from this so I probably going to have to go quickly through a couple of these slides because they are quite technical but that's okay uh next slide before I do that though I just wanted to make you aware one thing that I found when we were doing uh when we were working in linh Haven Bay by Virginia Beach and one of the interesting things from the historical record if you look at that little yellow circle down here okay so right down here in the 1940s so this slide a little bit dated Now by a few years but in the 1940s Lin Haven Bay produced nearly twice as many oysters as all of ches bay produces in terms of the um public commercial grounds also one other thing you may not have known is that in linh Haven they used to call their oysters linh Haven fancies they had nice salty taste to them and uh demanded a much higher price than other oysters and in fact some of the uh Growers back then used to bring their oysters into the LM for a couple weeks or so let them acquire that taste and then sell them at a higher price kind of interesting so wonderful system okay next all right so one of the first things that we're investigating quite a bit is what's called metapopulation Dynamics so you know that there're many different populations of oysters and they're connected by larby and what we're trying to find out is how well are they connected and and not just how they're connected but in which way are some of them sources or syns and how can we use that information to optimize restoration so next slide uh as an example I'm going to show you what we did in the bian we did this a good while back however the reason I'm showing you this is because now we have the results from our surveys and it was a highly successful um restoration effort working with the core of engineers uh there you just see some of the initial information you need obviously you need habitat maps and that's what this is next based on habitat maps and the historical record it's really important and any kind of knowledge that uh the locals might have regarding that we designate a number of potential sites for restoration those are all the numbers next and then we run hydram models and if you could click the arrow I'm at it if it works so we can run these hydrodynamic models and assess where the lar goes so we know a lot about the laral biology and they're going up and down go to the next slide there's one more so you can choose different release points and then you can see where they end up and one of the things that is a major major Advance right now in hydram modeling is we can now we have uh unstructured grid models what that means is that you can adapt your grid and in fact the model we're currently using is you can actually have resolution of 10 square meters I mean phenomenally small areas so you can you can use this information to determine where you want to put your restoration reefs you could potentially also use it for agiculture I I would assume but it's a major major Advance now some like Alison col might say well prove it you know how do you know these are correct what what we do is the the physicists physical oceanographers try to validate the models in terms of the physical processes solinity water dep and so on so that's where we're at right now we cannot track individual oyer larity I think there are some advances potentially with genetics it's very very expensive so right now we have to rely on these models and then in some cases field validation we can do that which we did in the Pian thing next and then we can generate the areas where would be best to have for instance root stock and substrate restoration and so and areas where you can just simply put shell out and that is because so these areas here are areas that receive a lot of lar from inside the system this area is one where oysters [Music] self-replenishing and any lar that you might produce there are shot out if the habitat is suitable however these areas are good to grow at right and in fact in history that what was typically what happened with UPR River areas that they were really good growout areas but not good for restoration uh and then over here uh these are areas that don't get many Larry and any Larry coming out from here are shot out of the system now what we don't know is maybe they go down here somewhere to other areas but this was just looking at the Pian tank and so the Army Corps constructive reefs in this area and they've done very very well um so the the major advances of really how at the level of resolution that we can now do this when we originally ran that model we can only do it at about probably 100 to 200 meters by 200 at best and probably even more but now 10 square meters that's a really small area okay next so so the next part is is a little bit about math and so I'm going to show you how we have been uh uh well let me go to the next slide so what we've been doing is uh for almost uh 15 years now we've been working on specific models to model the Dynamics on oyster reaps and we're using patch oyster reaps and the idea is how can we model this so that we get the best or the most successful performance of voice Ser next a lot of math but a lot these are actually biologically important variables that we actually put into the functions for instance the role of oyer filtration how is that dealing with sediment uh how is the what's the role of shell the amount of shell volume and so in providing the substrate for settlement spatone settlement and so on so these are all based on realistic elements uh derived from field experiments field observations some of them even from Alison C um I guess I shouldn't have said even from from Allison's work next okay uh oh this is okay this is not the Revis presentation I had but doesn't matter uh so this was just to illustrate what we're doing these are one of the things that we're doing is where can you get the highest performance of a reef so in this case is the r simply represents dead shell if you just put out shell or substrate a is the number of adults and then we can determine at what level of adults and shell alone and the combination of the two gives you the best output that's all I wanted to show with this that we can now optimize restoration elements next so for instance in this case we have on the x axis we have sediment deposition we all know that's that too much sediment will kill off the spat also uh larger oysters so we look at the amount of sediment deposition based on information we get from the geologist geological oceanographers this is the amount of larel production that's in the system so some places Maryland you know you don't have a lot of that but Virginia we do and so we see okay if we if we know something about sediment deposition and something about laral production how high do we need to build a reef this was the reef height issue in this case in order for the population to persist and so for instance the way to read this is if you have sort of mid-range of sediment deposition and the larel production is at least 700 in this case per square meter then you need reefs of this size and you can see the color scale that's in point in and meter so it's it ranges from 0.1 to3 MERS you need to build the reef at least that high under those conditions for the population to persist and so you can use that information directly applied of course a med you have to have some information on larable availability which actually we can use shell strings to get that information and from the GE geological oan AR get this sort of information about how much sediment is in system next uh this is one of the interesting one of the interesting outcomes we were able to use the model to determine how much sediment you could allow on a new restoration Reef uh so that it would persist so what this is saying so for instance if you put out a restoration Reef with just shell or artificial substrate then um then what's going to happen when there's settlement buildup on that brief before you have settlement and basically what this does it tells us what the relationship is between that initial settlement amount and the critical Reef height that it needs to be for it to persist basically what we're getting from this we're trying to get a uh we know SP we know when spat settlement occurs and so we what we want to know is when should you build the reef to optimize its performance you know should you put it out two months ahead one month can you put it out fall after spat settlement and will it actually succeed the following year so we're trying to get at those sort of issues and in fact we're now conducting an experiment at the naval weapons station with the Navy where we are putting reaps out uh we just put some out we're going to put put some out in early spring and some right before spat settlement to test some of the ideas from here next um okay so I had a nice picture here from uh some of the work we're doing at the naval weapons station so I revised it on the way here put it in but then it was too late yeah too late Sor uh okay so what what the picture shows is one of the things that we're doing with the enal weapon station is we're looking at various types of Alternatives Reef structures X reefs domes which are like Reef Balls uh Granite simple Granite reefs oyster castles and so on we're trying to determine what the cost benefit is for these so we're going to be measuring we are measuring what the produ oyster production and actually in our in this case muscle production as well and how much do these Le cost and per unit area River Bottom we're trying to determine which of these is going to give you the most bank for your buck we're also actually investigating fishing crab use of those but the point being that there was another bullet there that would say that the reef construction um alternative reefs uh can be a very successful way but we need to optimize which ones we use so I'm not going to go through these uh conclusions now um you go to next slide quickly uh one of the things uh just an example of the success we've had and go to next slide final one um so one of the things that I had added to that was the win-win and the win-win comes from using things like hydram models Technologies to identify if I restore reefs in this area for instance at the naval weapons station on the Southshore how many of its lar will end up up on the commercial oyster grounds on the North Shore we've actually already modeled some of that and we want to make sure that enough larby come back to the reefs but then also go out to the commercial grounds it's kind of like the idea is like having a savings account right you want you want to have some level of principle which would be the restoration Reas and then you can use the interest the interest being what larv are then being sent to other parts of the system I'll end quickly on this this is is the true event so I'm also a blue crabby colist but I was in Florida a gator was actually tracking a blue crab and ended up catching it on a mud flat it's pretty pretty cool just have to show that it's real and we'll open it up Q&A so Dr good morning everyone I'm very excited uh to introduce our research o genomic genetic breeding I'm M I'm a oyster researcher working at environmental and research laboratory at Morgan University yeah this show the where our lab is our lab is in uh Southern Maryland next to P River the lab has 2,500 hat including LD rout so I joined to Morgan PR in 2017 in 2018 I started Oiler breeding program with support of the university and the goal of this uh breeding program is to utilize genetic breeding approach to improve trees of interest in E oyster to help the growing agiculture industry and restoration next please speaking of genetical Brea people may easily think of the G modification such as transgenic Gene edit as well as the trip so those Technologies involved direct changes in genetic contents such as chromosome da or gen there are also uh several methods that do not need modified genetics they relay on the existing genetic variation in organism there are millions of genetic variations in uh among individuals in your organism and those genetic variations are called s nuclear typ polymorphisms we called S&P for short there are associations between of organism and those &ps if we can understand the association between this S&P as the treat we may use this information to help us select the best f stock to produce the offsprings um with our desirable treat if a treat associated with a fi genetic variations so that involved a method called Mark assist selection but if a treat with millions of genetic variation that involves a approach called genetic selection nowadays the Gen genetical breeding has been very common in our lives there are many uh successful cases in the L stock crop fruit and vegetable and AG culture species such as Sal uh compared to traditional breeding process the genetic breeding can make greater genetic GES within short breing period we don't need we for many many years for the phist selection and right now our life the genetic breathing work in Oyster program we use a tripid and genomic selection next please uh this slide shows how genomic selection works the critical part for genomic selection is to find out the association between the genetical variation also call it genotypes and phenotypes first we need to construct a reference population with know phenotypes and genotypes then we bring up the values of phenotypes and genotypes to linear uh equation to get the impact of each genetic variation to this treat that is uh we call U the prediction model with this prediction model we can make a prediction uh in candidate Ro stock uh we can uh get the genotype of this cand Ro we don't need to know their phenotypes the pH the predict phal type for the candidate St also called breeding value the breeding value the all means the selection priority for this candidate to gr stock next please this is a case our effort uh in using gen genetic selection to improve the growth and loc survival in Wild oysters we collected wild oyster from P re in 2019 and use this uh to spawn F1 lines we Cur this i1 line to for2 years old and sampled 1,000 o and level them and measure their grow treat as the grow grow treat and then they did the loing challenge experiment on this 1000 experiment and we collect the th samples and S samples and send them orinal next please uh after having the phenotype and genotype values we can uh construct and make the prediction model so I w't tell how the math how we do the math for make the prediction model but from the plot for the two Tre because there's a high correlation between the predict phenotype and obser phye the high the correlation is higher means the genomic selection is more more powerful next please after having the prediction model we hand uh no we can make a prediction in the real production we will continue to collect candidate St BL stock from R for those we don't know there Tre because we don't know when they are B and we don't know their survival status because we don't do the uh we don't need to do the L challenge pamer again but we can have their genotypes and we have the prediction model using that we can make prediction get the breing value we will use the high breeding value animal to produce a good line and use the low breeding value to produce bad L and the F the test the F the test uh finally if we find the good line did perform does perform better than the B land that means the genic selection is infective and we can improve the B stock the treat of we stock in a short reading period and we think this would be very helpful for the oyst restoration and spot on shell aquaculture because those activities require us use a wild Bo stock to produce the seed to protect the genetic diversity of the Wild population next another genome genetic breing work we did is tripid we all know the uh advantages of a tripid oyster they grow fast but there are also some weakness for the trip oer in some stressful environment triple oer may be not tolerant as the deployed oyster recently in our ltic experiment we found the tripid oyster only have lower than 20% survival but for the deid oyst it's around 50% and another V is is there's a gen envirment to infect that is said if oyster grow in environment that is totally different with their original environment their performance may be very bad you our another project we have three imported uh to lines C in our Pier refund there are one year old survival is lower than 40% but for the Marland uh tripid oyster they have around 80% Sur that means there's much space to improve for tripo oyster next the tri do not exist naturally so uh people us use the deploy to get first triploid then I use the female triploid made with deploy the me to get a tet tet have four sets of chromosom so we can me with deploy the oyster naturally and get get a large steel Tri see for industrial use from that map we can see uh in each step if we have a superior deployed oer we may make Improvement for the tripo C for the industrial use next please so far our lab have produced six o Lin to deploy the land and a three deplo line and three tripid Lin next please over this lines there are two highlighted line one is a line B20 that is a h line from resistant line from H lab and meet with locally uh Maryland wild oyster and the RO stock has been under low selection so that Lin have has showed the higher R in lowed water and how fast growing treat due to the hydrosis and another Tri Alliance is uh we use a chemical method to produce a trip from the P River while the oyster that lines show comparative uh compar uh comparable uh grow speed and survival with the commercial Tri line so both the deplo line D and the line D are good materials for us to produce a tpid in future all use as deploy to improve the meeting with existing triploid to improve the triploid o for the industry next please at last I want to quickly share another highlight of work genetic breeding work in soft sh a potential species for Maryland aquaculture this space has a big challenge for farming success because it is very sensitive to high temperature the summer high temp water temperature in theic you can K most of the animals if they are deployed in the shallow water and uh this this year It produced more than 300,000 softare clany from the main stock and Mar local wild stock and the preliminary experiment has showed us the while differ among the individual within population and between the population that is a precondition for successful uh genetic operum what we are doing right now is to develop a Marist selection to improve the treat treat and we hope this can help later in near future to initiate this alternative industry with the CH SP and we welome any area collaboration please at last uh many thanks to our team and SP funding sponsor and especially want to thank uh our G in Maryland they give a lot of help and at last thank you for everyone's attention and the opportunity by speak all aliens thank you very much I want to thank the presenter you made my job as a moderator a lot easier since you're all on time so we have time for Q&A and we have uh a number of folks online that are have the opportunity to submit questions so let me just open it up is there any questions for any the presenters here in the room first I guess we're all perfectly understandable there we go um Dr y uh the the genetic markers that are used to improve theut to soft is that the same marker that's present in a lot of other organ like can that be applied on a wider scale to other organisms as we address climate change uh yeah I think that's good question I think right now we are working on that so right now I think the some Mark come from like related genes among different animal have located in the same gen but the detailed uh genetic variation may be different question gentleman there yeah this is for R not be wi you anticipate your tools that you're using for the modeling and that kind of thing be someday useful for a commercial operator SC on shell and identify Optimum so could you repeat the question for those online yes uh so the question was are some of the techniques that we're using now in modeling hydronics and so on hydronic modeling are they potentially going to be useful to Growers or in the in the future and I would say right now we have some pretty good ideas we already have habitat suitability models which I didn't go into there um and so this is simply I would say a technique mainly for oyster restoration but certainly it could be applied um as far as how far we are from having some readily available tool that's something we've been thinking about and we're hoping to develop something in the next couple years so that people can just go in and determine habit that durability and potentially uh something about the con connectivity and so on in the system that's a really good question Stan I'm quite surprised [Music] that's question for bill um so you're talking about some things that can be done with production to increase yeld but also some of more tangible things quality you give any advice to Growers um currently in the industry growers in terms of how to translate that with marketing to help the bottom line know you kind of think about that as well no I think you know uh I've definitely tried to steer away from that there is a single answer to producing the perfect oyster you know I think it's finding the perfect market for your oyster and but that does mean understanding what you're producing and what others are producing some people care about the cup on an oyster and some people that you're selling to don't some people care about mud blisters on the oyster and some people don't and that's all okay that's that there's no there's no County Fair prize for best oyster in the world like and so um what we're trying to do is give people um good science that shows that if you do this you reduce mud blisters by this much and here's what it here's what we estimate that it cost to do and actually I would love if we could get to the point I'm trying to work with a couple economists where if you make a decision on your farm I'd like to not just show you this is how it changes growth rate I'd like to show you how it changes in the market that you're interested in how it changes your profit per oyster um because a lot of the a lot of the ways to get higher quality uh in air quotes or consistency involve more labor um and so is it worth it um and that's something again there are reasons you might grow an oyster a certain way that might make you less profit but maybe it's a a more reliable Market there a lot of reasons to do that so I'm not trying to skirt it but that is the type of stuff that we would work closely with a grower to try to get them the information that they need when we go to a question online sure um Steve there are several questions online for you um what are the contingency plans severe weather at solo oysters good question uh so um again the platform is mobile and uh in the event of severe weather it could be moved it's used for restoration however it's important to recognize that initating requirements that you're growing for for market for agriculture then maybe certain permiting or lease requirements where it has to be stationary uh we are pursuing in a parallel path deploying larger units uh in the C Point area of the ches bay we have lease application in and it's envisioned there we we've modeled the the morage and Anchorage requirements for that location and sever weather and um so the short answer is if it's being grown for Market uh it needs to be secure uh however it is mobile it could be could be moved in the event of severe weather if it is for restoration generally have leas or compartments that generally AR quite as stringent so but it's lot ofite specific two other questions for you online if if you want to take these where so far where are your oysters grown and where are the likely destinations and then the estimated cost in the entire buildout with bags your system so again what we're doing right now is testing the Prototype it consider this kind of like in a Shakedown phase uh to improve the technology um our goal again as a company is to provide this technology to those who are Growers or either in the restoration business uh we may have to as an interim measure as I said at COD Point uh be a grower or partner with a grower to do that uh but ultimately our goal is to be a a seller of this technology or potentially lease the lease the platform out to those who want to use it um in terms of the cost I guess what the the questioners really ask what what a cost to buy one of these very good question and you know we learned a lot this year we're continuing to frankly tweak our financial model um I can't tell you like a price point right now I think the best way to think of this if you're a land farmer it's like making an investment in a combine or a tractor to help increase your yields that's I think that's the best parallel that I can tell you right now but probably over the next year we'll have a better better handle on that yes I have a question for ROM has the LEL drift models the hydrodynamic models been applied to other systems successfully well we've applied them um can you repeat the question sorry we repeat the question as well have the have the doal drift models been applied in other systems so so far we've applied them inen Bay uh We've applied them in the great blacko we applied them in the Bianca tank we're working on the York River and then uh we think we're going to get funded to apply the Tanger Island restoration which that's going to be a really interesting one because very different system and some of these other closed system semios tributaries yes sir yes for R also um are you doing are you collaborating with your work with University of Maryland on the modeling that's being done there on the systems that are being developed there no they they're a like Elizabeth North and soone who's there uh I think they're producing their own models they use a different modeling system they typically use chess RS we don't use that we use the Schism model which as far as we know is the stateof thee art model in terms of resolution and so on so we have talked in the past but we're not collaborating I think that would be a really good thing to do U but right now the funding doesn't really allow it um to get that not quite yet would love to do that yes have a question for Dr L um I was really excited to hear that were able to spawn soft shell clams and we're trying to do that similar thing with soft shell clams in Virginia but we're having trouble using heat shop to get them to spawn and I'm just wondering uh what techniques you use for spawning yes um yeah we all use the same uh method heat shock like increase the temperature so give you but the he you play like double SW if the temper increase b c there limitation so it will CA do the same thing follow yeah yeah sure have more questions online yeah so Dr L there are two questions online for you um just go to those what's currently known about the genetic breeding for resistance to ocean acidification and or hypoxia um and then do you see producers um having any Market resistance to what might be perceived as a GMO oyster uh first question yes so right now there's a tri Institute collaborative projects always gomic selection so like powerp point and our team are focus on Lo and tolerance they also team from uh uh Sony Brooks University and uh University of we focus on the fication and Hyo so that's the um the approach are the same but the trait are different so there's work I'm going about to treat the second can you do producers see any Market resistance to what might be perceived as GMO oysters and then is there any uh concern about escapement or mingling with wild o uh I think that's the two different way for the market selection so it there are some limitation it has to be used um under the um truth that the treat the desable treat is has a high H ability that means the genetics control aot or control most of this treat but for the U like a g engineer uh project so we U modify uh the genetic contents that are first really on the same has higher control for this tree second but we uh changed the The genome or the genetic contents uh at the beginning that we had some risk but I think after this table it make the coate add that I add to that I would just say especially at a conference where we got people from restoration and fishery aculture that I think it's very important that we be clear about cryptoid so you know there's a lot of definitions out there my fellow panelists Define them as genetically modified organisms in his talk but many people do not this is the triploid oyster that we produce has all the genetic material is Coster for the triploid oyster that they produce on the west coast is all c a gigus material there is no Crossing of DNA from a different species being combined so by many definitions um including I think the FAO um this is not considered a GMO so I think that's critical I don't want the audience taking away the triploids or GMOs from this I would disagree with that the it is Extreme L common in the marketplace if you eat oysters on the west coast you're eating tripid oysters if you eat oysters on the East Coast you're probably eating tripid oysters if you eat seedless watermelons you're eating tripid watermelons if you're eating bananas with no seeds you're eating tripid bananas this is common when you say at a scientific meeting the word oid that ends in oid you'll get a lot of attention from consumers because that doesn't sound good I wrote a proposal once and I called my triploid oysters in that seedless oysters and I called the other oysters diploids and reviewer came back that diploid oysters didn't sound like something he would want to eat in fact those are the normal oysters those are the wild oysters so I think we have to be careful about terminology um and so there is Market if you talk about tripid there will be Market resistance to that typically we call them spawn oysters or four season oysters where it's not even mentioned I just have a fat oyster in the summer so um the other question was about spread triploids are essentially sterile and it is very difficult to prove that they are 100% sterile but you get past 99% sterile pretty fast and so we're not worried about mixing with wild populations in fact diploids spawned and used in aquaculture are likelier to have an effect on the wild population with the tripid was I don't know that's a negative effect I'm not saying that but triploids are not spawning from uh commercial any other questions online or yeah there are two others online um what oceanographic processes like temperature salinity pH are driving the laral settlement model and how often is ground tring happening um in the bay the validate model outputs so the um the model itself the hydrodynamic model has two elements one is the physical part which is the dection the laral movement and so on as a function of whatever the physical environment is the other part is the biological model and so most of this um as I mentioned earlier most of the validation or calibration is is really done with physical processes what we also do is in Virginia what we're able to do to try to validate the biological part that is how many l are settling out is we actually go out and Sample RI rat uh any kind of Harden structures along the shoreline they're a very good indicator of where you get settlement so it's not the it's not going to be a very detailed um analysis in terms of you don't know what exactly where they're coming from and so on but we have for instance validated the model in linh Haven and in the bian tank and so so that where the model said that there aren't going to be many lar when we went out there and sampled the rip WRA in fact that validated that part of the model before we end the because I know we only have a few more minutes I did want to take the opportunity if I could just ask each one of you um if you could give the audience some indication of your assessment of how climate change is going to affect all of our efforts to want to increase yields you could just spend a minute or two each one of you uh I'll go first then we down the line again so you know I think uh the biggest concern in aquaculture the most sorry the most immediate concern has been Marvel uh production that seems to be a more sensitive stage and so that's where we think we start to see effects of ocean ification and and possibly other effects of climate change particularly on the west coast so that's the the first area of concern but then certainly thinking about how the environment that Dr Lou mentioned the environment that these oysters are grown out and the stresses that they face and so thinking about that as an additional stressor on top of of what they might normally face Dr L yes uh so I think the climate change how the impact to the oyster is it may bring the new challenges for o or sh such as the new disease appear or some environmental change like the high rall to reduce the Bas salinity cost mortality or temperature increase May uh increase the mortality for soft shell CL so that's um there are new challenges Dr by the clent change and our work is TR to cope with this challenges through a fast FAS method to uh improve the treat to help the industry thank you so uh quickly the oyster lives in the tropics and lives in subtropical areas and temperate areas but uh I think the main effects in my view are that the oyster will be able to colonize areas where it wasn't able to colonize in Marland part of the bay like for instance in in just south of the Maryland part in Great White Comico we have consistently seen just the rip wrap wrapped up with oysters but they don't survive when you have a severe winter and so so I think that's a positive side negative side is we don't really know what disease is going to do um I don't think the Predators are going to be as much of an issue but certainly disease could become much more prominent so trade off great thank you so much

Channel: Chesapeake Bay Foundation

Views: 88

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Id: zc_Ei1HGIJo

Length: 61min 54sec (3714 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023