
DATE: Tuesday, November 18, 1997            TAG: 9711180293

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: BY LANE DeGREGORY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: PLYMOUTH                          LENGTH:  131 lines

RESEARCHERS HOOKED ON IDEA OF FISH FARMS

Farm-raised bass have better chance of survival, fewer harvesting limits. Harry Daniels didn't have to gas up a boat Monday morning. He didn't have to check weather forecasts, secure state-issued seafood tags or shiver through white-capped waves. He didn't even have to find any fish.

Thousands of thick-bodied bass were waiting for him in the shallow ponds behind his office.

``It's good to see these fellows come out nice and big and healthy,'' Daniels said, scooping scores of stripers from a dark green net. ``They're good-looking fish. That makes me proud.''

A North Carolina State University professor who studies aquaculture at the Vernon James Research Center in Plymouth, Daniels has spent the past two years breeding white and striped bass. He helped them spawn, made sure their eggs hatched, then transferred the tiny ``fry'' into plastic tanks inside a heated shed. When the fish were about 5 days old, he took them outside and released them into 12 half-acre ponds. He fed them protein pellets about the size of pencil erasers. He checked their water conditions daily.

Monday morning, Daniels and his assistants harvested their first crop of hybrids: about 2,500 pounds of fish that will be served in restaurants from Boston to Chicago.

``I know their parents. I've watched these fish grow up. I've seen every stage of development,'' said Daniels, 39. ``They've done a lot better than we thought. We're hoping to see a whole crop of fish farms spring up in northeastern North Carolina as a result of this research.''

Watermen are struggling not to drown in the sea of red tape that has engulfed commercial fishing during the last decade. Seafood suppliers are trying to keep markets open, despite state-set seasons that last only a few months. And biologists are working to figure how to keep fish populations productive in the wild. So researchers like Daniels are becoming invaluable.

They're studying ways to raise fish on farms - from finger-sized fledglings to sellable seafood. They're learning how much space each fish needs to thrive, what kind of commercially produced food works best and even what species survive. They're sharing their findings with anyone who wants to set up aquaculture operations.

And they could soon be providing most of the fish for the future.

``As long as regulations are going to keep putting commercial fishermen out of work; as long as the government's going to tell us how big our fish have to be, when we can catch 'em and how many we can keep; and as long as folks still want to eat fish, this is the way to go,'' Ricky Nixon said of fish farming.

A seafood dealer who owns a wholesale shop outside Edenton, Nixon bought Daniels' brood Monday. He paid the state $2 per pound for the seafood. He predicts he'll get about $2.50 per pound when he sells it wholesale.

It cost Daniels about $1.50 per pound to raise the hybrid species.

Striped bass caught in the wild are bringing watermen about $1.10 per pound. But regulations require them to throw back fish smaller than 18 inches. And commercial fishermen can keep only five fish per day that are caught in the sound.

``The problems with the wild fish are caused by rules,'' Nixon said of striped bass - also called rockfish. ``For the last eight years, there's been a quota on how much you can keep and seasons set aboutwhen we can sell 'em and size limits for the species. You can't keep a year-round market alive when you can only supply it for two months. And restaurants want a fish that'll make a single serving. They don't want a great big fillet off an 18-inch rock. They like those little 1- to 2-pound, 12-inchers like the fish farms produce. But fishermen aren't allowed to catch and keep those.''

Advantages of aquaculture are just beginning to bubble to the surface. It can be done on private property without access to wide waterways or worries about weather. Fish farms can produce harvests almost year-round. And the crops are fairly consistent, yielding fish almost all the same size and weight.

There are no unwanted species to cull out of nets, no small fish to throw back. Daniels said his crops have yielded about 5,000 pounds per acre. And it only takes about 18 months for them to grow from eggs to a sellable size.

In the wild, biologists estimate, about 1/2 of 1 percent of the eggs striped bass fertilize survive. Aquaculture operators can count on about 20 percent of their crops growing to adulthood.

``You put 1,000 little fish in, you know how many you'll get out,'' said Joanna Harcke, a graduate student who helped Daniels weigh his hybrids Monday. ``There's not a lot of guesswork going on. When we're done catching them in nets, we'll drain the ponds and get every last fish out of here.''

Female fish used in Daniels' spawning experiments were white bass from a lake near Raleigh; males were striped bass caught in the Roanoke River. The offspring look like striped bass - but they have thicker bodies. Their dark stripes also are broken in some places, though not in a regular pattern.

Scientists and seafood dealers say diners can't tell the difference between hybrid, farm-raised fish and those seined from the sounds.

``White bass like fresh water. Striped bass live in saltwater. These hybrids can be raised in either - and they're a lot heartier than either one of their parent species,'' Daniels said. ``They grow faster. They're more tolerant of changes in their water temperature and environment. And they're more resistant to diseases than either white or striped bass.''

Daniels raised his crop in fresh water drawn from a 300-foot well. Motorized pumps aerate the ponds so the water absorbs more oxygen. But the scientist didn't have to take anything out of the water - or add anything to it.

Once the bass were outside, he had to feed them once a day.

``About 50 percent of the cost of operating a striped bass farm is feed,'' Daniels said. ``Commercial aquaculture operators feed their fish twice a day at least. We were trying to see if we could cut costs and labor by only doing it once a day - and it seemed to work fine for these fish.''

More than 100 fish farms nationwide culture hybrid striped bass in ponds, tanks and cages. North Carolina supports 23 such aquaculture operations - more than any other state. The first one opened in 1989 near Aurora and still supplies much of the area's fingerlings for farmers who don't spawn their own crops but prefer to raise them from little fish.

Nationwide, aquaculture operations produce about 8 million pounds of hybrid striped bass annually. An estimated 15 percent comes from North Carolina. The area's newest fish farm is a few miles east of Columbia, off U.S. 64 at a crossroads called Woodley.

Here, on a 104-acre tract, Zach Bray and his parents have set up Pure Water Farms. They began digging ponds for their $500,000 project about a year ago. In the last month, they've caught and sold 15,000 pounds of fish.

By March, Bray said, they hope to harvest 150,000 to 200,000 pounds of hybrid striped bass.

``The state's given us a lot of support in this project. Daniels and other researchers have answered all our questions and really helped us get off the ground,'' said Bray, a 32-year-old former computer programmer who moved from Virginia Beach to the remote reaches of rural northeastern North Carolina to help his folks start their fish farm. ``We've learned that if the ponds are well maintained, the fish pretty much take care of themselves.

``And we didn't have any trouble at all marketing them. Etheridge's Seafood in Wanchese contacted us about shipping our crops across the East Coast. Farm-raised fish seem pretty easy to sell.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]

DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot

Kyle Barnes, above, walks a seine net through a pond to collect

hybrid bass at the Vernon James Research Center in Plymouth. The

fish, generally 12-inchers, can then be loaded into containers, as

in right photo, and prepared for sale. Fish farms like these could

make fresh fish at restaurants a year-round tradition, rather than

one that is dependent on a limited harvesting season and

restrictions on the amount of fish a waterman can bring in daily.