Impact study – A more sustainable and productive aquaculture industry

We partnered with Australian prawn farmers to develop a new prawn that is producing record farm yields, leading to increased supplies of top quality, sustainably produced seafood.

Our scientists undertook a ten year program of selective breeding in order to develop the prawn now being used by prawn farmers in Australia.

Domesticated founder stocks have been established at three farms. Broodstock rearing knowledge and technology has been transferred from CSIRO to each farm. Novel genetic and viral health screening and mating allocation systems developed by CSIRO, are being implemented on-farm.

The use of genetic markers means that natural mating is now a cost-effective alternative to rearing each breeding family in separate tanks. The viral screening technology is assisting the industry to develop breeds that are highly tolerant to endemic diseases.

Independent economic analysis indicates that if the entire Australian Black Tiger prawn industry adopted this new breeding technology, it would increase the industry’s production from 5000 tonnes to 12,500 tonnes and add $120 million to the value of the industry by 2020 (assuming no further expansion of production area).

Read more here.

CSIRO Aquaculture contact

Dr Harry King – Senior Research Scientist, Breeding and Genomics