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Abstract:

The European inland aquaculture production has been stagnating and even declining for some species. One of the possible strategies to enhance inland production is species diversification. The idea is to aim for highvalue species, which allow for bigger investments needed for commercially profitable production in Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS). We will present the different steps to be taken to establish a new species in aquaculture, using as a case study our over a decade-long work on burbot. Because of its potential fast growth rate and high market value, the European burbot (Lota lota lota) was selected in 2009 by AQUA-ERF (Odisee University of Applied Sciences) to investigate its aquaculture potential as a commercial food fish. Several tasting panels confirmed the high consumer acceptance and willingness to purchase. At that point, little to no knowledge was available on the culture of this species, and nothing at all on its culture in RAS. Since 2009 our scientists investigated in several projects many aspects of the culture of burbot. These aspects ranged from grow-out trials to determine the growth potential, optimal temperature for growth and stocking densities, benchmark commercial feeds. Subsequently, larval culture techniques were developed with as result the firstever milestone of weaning being reported. Other milestones are the artificial reproduction of RAS born broodstock and out-of-season reproduction. Having solved all these practical bottlenecks, large-scale commercial production in RAS both for human consumption as restocking and stock enhancement is now within reach! Since 2015 commercial grow-out of the species in Belgium has been slowly undertaken both in flowthrough and RAS, followed by the start-up of a commercial hatchery operating in RAS which has been founded from our lab and started operations in 2017.