15 DECEMBER 1999
Agromarina runs Panama's leading hatchery, which is located on 5.8 acres of land at Veracruz near Panama City. The Agromarina hatchery is one of the most advanced hatcheries in Latin America. Eric Gonzalez, Agromarina's general manager, explained to me the difference between Agromarina and the Ecuadorian shrimp hatcheries.
Eric stated, "In Ecuador, I've been told there are in excess of 300 hatcheries, and no more than 20 maturation facilities. There, they depend greatly on the capture of gravid females. They take the eggs and sell them to the hatchery. The eggs are then hatched to get the nauplii. The nauplii are then raised to post-larvae and that is it.
In Agromarina's case, we have our own maturation facility. We sort the adults that are captured from the wild using a shrimp boat. The crew is ours and they have been well trained.
To sort adults from the wild, we use special nets with bigger size holes in them. We are only interested in capturing the bigger animals; anything that is below 40 grams is returned to the ocean. Nets are dragged for 15 to 20 minutes at a time. We don't want to harm the animal; we want them alive and in good condition. So, our interaction with Mother Nature is not anything that affects the environment or the shrimp population."
The wild seedstock shrimp farms and their financial success are thereby dependent upon timely, adequate and continuing availability of wild seedstock and subsequent confined growing. The semi-closed cycle approach, used by Agromarina, minimizes this historically prevalent business risk. Furthermore, it has been Agromarina's experience that hatchery/nursery seedstock postlarvae have a higher survival rate during growing than do wild seedstock.
Eric added, "For 1999, we should be producing between 6 and 7 billion nauplii. We are in the market to sell nauplii, and we export nauplii to Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Belize, Nicaragua, Honduras, and even years ago to the U.S. and Mexico. We will have the capacity to produce 125 million (post-larvae) per month in 1999.
We feed the shrimp bloodworms which are captured here in Panama, we feed them squid that we import from the States, and we also feed them dry feed, but the diet is mostly made up of bloodworms and squid. In the next six months we are going to start feeding them concentrated feed. We have been trying out some various feeds from the U. S., and it's a little bit too early, but it seems we are going to move away from using bloodworms and squid.
We believe that growth of shrimp farming in Panama is such that the increase in acreage is moving faster than the increase in larvae production from the hatchery. We trick ourselves into thinking that Panama will continue to be well-stocked in terms of hatchery-produced larvae and that there will be a sufficient supply to satisfy the local demand and to export, but because everybody wishes to stock at the same period of the year, from beginning of February to the end of April, then the supply begins to be a problem.
(excerpts from article "Technology, experience and perseverance: success in Panama" in Aquaculture Magazine, September/October 1999, Vol. 25, No. 5)