Catfish eggs transport

From:           María Vicenta Valdivia <mvaldivi@fundch.cl>
To:             AQUA-L@killick.ifmt.nf.ca
Sent:    26 Mar 2001

QUESTION:

Does any of you have information about channel catfish eggs
transport? Any reference about that will be very useful.

María Vicenta Valdivia S.
Aquaculture Department
Fundación Chile
PO Box 773, Santiago, Chile

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COMMENTS 1:

Eggs are usually transported from ponds to the hatchery in large
insulated coolers. These coolers contain oxygen stones and small
12-volt pumps to circulate water.  If you are wanting to transport fish
long distance it is best to hatch the eggs and transport the fish as
yolk sac fry. 

You will find an article on transport and handling catfish eggs on our
website.
http://www.msstate.edu/dept/tcnwac/dec00.html

Jim Steeby
Area Extension Agent/Aquaculture
Mississippi State University Extension Service
P.O.BOX 239
Belzoni, MS 3903, USA   

Tel: 662-247-2915,  fax 662-247-3823
Email:jsteeby@ext.msstate.edu
HomePage http://www2.msstate.edu/~jas17/index.html
         http://www.msstate.edu/dept/tcnwac

***************

COMMENTS 2:

I am Aquaculture Engineer, and I work at the Aquaculture Department of Fundacion Chile (Chile), institution avocated to develop aquaculture industry in our country, among others activities. Since a few years ago, we have been working in the culture of Channel Catfish (Ictalurus punctatus), exotic species introduced with productive aims.

We are currently interested about to incorporate new biological
material to our non-native channel catfish stock, so that will be a
critical point in the following years to develop this industry in Chile.

Our country has a very restrictive legislation concerning the
introduction of exotic species, because of the introduction of many
of the worst salmonids diseases in Chile in the last decade. In
addition, the transport of live fish implies very high shipping costs.
For these reasons, we are interested about importation of channel
catfish eggs from U.S.

I would like to know if you think there is any possibility of long-term
transport of fertilized channel catfish eggs.

María Vicenta Valdivia S.
Aquaculture Department
Fundación Chile
E-mail: mvaldivi@fundch.cl

***************

COMMENTS 3:

Apart from transport considerations I believe your proposal to import
catfish eggs would also reduce the risk of disease introduction.  It will be a tremendous advantage if you can establish a catfish aquaculture industry that does not have the severe economic constraint of serious diseases, eg. channel catfish virus, E. tarda, etc.

I had involvement some years back in the importation of channel catfish from California into quarantine in this country.  This was from a site with a testing history that indicated it was likely to have been free of channel catfish virus, but not E. tarda.

Egg masses were disinfected with iodophor and then airfreighted in water containing penicillin and streptomycin.  As the spawn is a gelatinous mass disinfection will be much less effective than with salmonid ova but in our view was still worth doing.

The hatch from all the egg masses imported was more than adequate for our purposes.

The catfish were tested for significant diseases while being reared in
quarantine (biological filtration of the water, chlorine sterilisation of
all water discharges, showering out of personnel, etc). The quarantine
protocol was for the channel catfish to be spawned in quarantine with
release of the progeny to a lower level of quarantine.

However, the project was canned after approximately 14 months as it was not considered possible to conclusively show by scientific trials, that the introduction of channel catfish would not have had adverse consequences for our introduced fish (especially salmonids), indigenous fish and the aquatic environment in general.  All disease testing to that point had been negative.

Colin Anderson.

E-mail: colin.anderson@xtra.co.nz

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