AQUACULTURE ADVANCE

Back in those dark and noisy days of arguing whether wild Atlantic salmon should be listed as an endangered species in eight Maine rivers, opponents claimed that the federally protected fish would become the mythic spotted owl of the Down East region, bringing its economy to a standstill. Supporters claimed that with the federal listing would come federal funds that would help the region not merely survive but even advance.

In the 18 months since the listing became official, the supporters are being proved correct. There has been federal money to modernize agriculture irrigation and to reduce riverbank erosion, projects that do far more than improve salmon habitat. There has been federal money to help the aquaculture industry overcome the ravages of infectious salmon anemia, a project that saved jobs that would have been lost without the listing.

Now there is a new round of federal money and this is where the advancing can really begin. It’s $5 million in grants available from the U.S. Department of Commerce, secured for this endangered species project by Sen. Olympia Snowe. The grants – the application period ends July 15 – are for projects emphasizing research and technology.

The phrase “research and technology” has a nice ring to it, especially for a part of the state that has had few cracks at the modern economy they imply. The scope of the project is broad, but crucial areas identified are as follows:

. Enhanced aquaculture cages that resist damage by weather or predators and prevent escapes of farmed fish.

. Selective breeding research to develop distinct North American broodstock strains that grow quickly, resist disease and eliminate current concerns about the interaction between wild salmon and the European strains now used by aquaculture. This is not, notes Michael Hastings of the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center in Orono, genetic engineering. It merely is the same process by which the poultry industry has in the last half century decreased from six months to 42 days the time it takes a chicken to grow from egg to broiler.

. Developing fish-marking techniques that allow farmed salmon to be tagged so that escapees or the spread of disease can be tracked.

. Research that will lead to the testing, development and deployment of vaccines that will prevent the spread of disease between farmed and wild fish.

. Biosecurity research that will lead to improved monitoring of cages, disease, predators and water-quality. With the expansion of aquaculture nationally and internationally, Mr. Hastings says this research will be of global importance and will be vital in the U.S. industry’s implementation of its self-imposed code of environmental ethics.

. Development of the aquaculture potential of other species – such as haddock, halibut and cod – to diversify the industry, expanding its reach in the marketplace and avoiding the problems associated with single-crop farming.

These grants offer economic advancement, first, because research itself is an important industry and aquaculture research is a niche seemingly made for Maine. Second, research often leads to development, testing, manufacturing and marketing, and Maine could do with a lot more of all those things.

As a bonus, this is guilt-free federal money. There’s not a trace of pork, nothing was packed into some obscure corner of a piece of legislation to get Maine aquaculture an undeserved goodie. This $5 million, and another $5 million available for other projects elsewhere this year, is the result of the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act of 1954. Those farsighted senators (JFK was one, Republican Leverett Saltonstall, also of Massachusetts, the other) recognized that commercial fishing was an increasingly uncertain business and so a fund was created using a portion of duties on imported fish to help American fishermen survive the inevitable downturns. Now, it is being applied to aquaculture industry and an Endangered Species Act that didn’t exist a half-century ago, and the intent is not to survive but to advance.