Lumpfish breakthrough can ease pressure on wild population
Scientists have discovered that lumpfish sperm can be cryogenically preserved and remain healthy, potentially reducing the need for increasing numbers of wild male lumpfish to be caught to supply the cleaner fish needs of the salmon farming industry.
A recently published paper in the journal Aquaculture, involving scientists from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), Akvaplan-niva and the University of Bergen, has shown there were no abnormalities in lumpfish hatched using cryogenically preserved, or frozen, sperm. The authors say this method will not only reduce the reliance on the wild male broodstock but also allow for greater natural selection of preferred traits.
The report is a first publication for Emily Purves, a SAMS UHI graduate, who completed the research in Tromsø, Norway as part of her Erasmus Mundus Aquaculture Environment and Society (ACES+) master’s degree. She now works with Highlands seafood processor AquaScot.
Parent fish
Purves said: “In recent years the demand for lumpfish to be used as cleaner fish has grown exponentially.
“While there are a number of hatcheries in Scotland rearing lumpfish, the eggs originate from wild broodstock. These wild-caught parent fish have to be culled to obtain their gametes and this continuous removal of fish has depleted wild stocks considerably.
“If cryopreservation was adopted as a common method of storing lumpfish sperm, it would allow egg production facilities to fertilise a far greater number of eggs from a single male.
“It is also an extremely useful tool for lumpfish breeding programmes as it provides a storage bank. If individuals from a particular egg clutch possess positive traits (effective lice eating), the sperm used to produce them is stored and can be used for further testing and or production of successful offspring.”
Effective protocols
While the reproductive success of the frozen sperm was poorer than that of the fresh sperm used in the study, the former still showed success rates high enough for future commercial research.
Co-author Albert Kjartan Dagbjartarson Imsland, of Norwegian research organisation Akvaplan-niva, is currently leading a lumpfish breeding programme looking at selective breeding for favourable traits in cleaner fish.
He said: “The results presented in Emily’s thesis, and now published in the Aquaculture article, will help us to develop effective protocols for enhancing our breeding programme, thus improving the lice efficacy and robustness of the lumpfish used as a biological delouser in Atlantic salmon farming.”
