The Private Sector's concluding remarks

Impressions of the meeting presented at the closing ceremony on behalf of the participants from the private sector as prepared by Richard Prickett (Marine Farm Technology, Ltd., UK) and Gidon Minkoff (Israel Salt Co Ltd., Israel)

On behalf of Gidon and myself, firstly I would like to thank Patrick and the committee for inviting us to give our opinions on behalf of the private sector and to add our congratulations to those already voiced by Bari on the usual high standard of organisation and presentation shown at this conference. Not many of us start a days work with a classical music interlude, more usually it is to the sounds of telephones and transistor radios down on the farm. Many thanks and much appreciated.

We have tried as much as possible even the last few days to collate the feelings and opinions of our colleagues and I hope that my comments will reflect most of their views as well as our own.

Concerning the quality of the posters and presentations and without singling out any single piece of work we were all impressed and informed on presentations reviewing several relevant topics. In particular:

aspect of egg quality
the ongoing work on live food enrichment and the latest ideas on fatty acid content as well as the status of other nutrients
the work on vitamins, particularly the role of vitamin C and the work on hormones
all papers relating to new species of commercial importance
the reports on the status of aquaculture in different regions at the world from fellow producers
plus todays' presentations on disease and potential methods for its control.

Also we fish farmers tend to pick up odd ideas from lectures which are often not part of the main presentation. One example of this was the use of water jets instead of air for surface cleaners in larval tanks given in a paper on flatfish farming in Ecuador. I remember looking at the audience and seeing everyone who was working in a marine fish hatchery making a note in their books!

On the slightly critical side, we would have to add that some of the work presented seemed to be repetitive and "old hat" and I wonder if some researchers carry out literature searches before say 1985 when there was a lot of good ground work done for example on larval rearing using green water techniques notably by people like Bari Howell and Ed Houde.

On the positive side we would like to make some suggestions as to the future organisation of the conference but we realise we are a minority and these are merely ideas to be bounced around:

If it was possible it may be useful if some more people from industry were invited to join the selection committee so that we can at least give our opinion on the presentations to be accepted. Our future role in suggesting potential areas for research has already been discussed and we welcome the proposals put forward by Dave Bengtson and Patrick.
On the subject of presentation of papers and posters we would find it a great help if presenters could summarise and highlight their commercial conclusions if any. We all have a very short attention span and find it tiring sometimes to pick out the nuggets!
Some colleagues also felt it would be useful if poster presenters could attend their posters at specific times to answer questions. It was often difficult to find some of them during the conference and it is so much easier to discuss the results of their work one to one.
We as an industry need to give researchers, particularly new people coming into the field of aquaculture research, the opportunity early in their career to experience life on the farm. This is already happening to a certain degree and needs to be encouraged further. In a similar vein, commercial companies need to offer their facilities more for on-site studies. We have already seen the value of this in some of the work presented here.
Another suggestion was the organisation of more workshops between industry and front line researchers.

Finally we have already received some feed-back on future research and development projects from colleagues in the private sector. These cover such areas as:

Broodstock genetics and selection
New species research on commercially important species
Disease identification, control and prevention
Sterilisation techniques for hatcheries with the ultimate aim of producing a recognised protocol
Water purification and treatment methodology for hatcheries
In the light of the increased use of bore-hole water especially for marine hatcheries it would be useful to see more work done on toxicology of heavy metals and the effect of other anions on the eggs and larvae of commercially reared species
Pigmentation development in red bream species
Larval physiology and development relative to feeding policy
Live food mass culture and storage.

We hope these views are seen as being constructive and will lead to further discussions in the future on a mutually beneficial basis.

Thank you for your attention.

Richard Prickett
Gidon Minkoff

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