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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 34 Number 9
May 2007
Blue mussel line culture workable in Gulf of Maine
WOODS HOLE, MA - The idea of raising blue mussels commercially offshore from suspended lines is not new. For years, fishermen and boaters have known if they leave a line in the water long enough, free-floating blue mussel larvae will attach themselves and start growing.
In 1998, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers did a three-year, $250,000 experiment to see if line culture had commercial potential. In an area 10 miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard, they created a network of stretched underwater lines to hold the juvenile blue mussels. The lines were deep enough to be out of the way of passing vessels, yet high enough to get the best of the sunlit food-rich water column.
Walter Paul, writing in WHOI’s 2000 annual report, observed that the suspended mussels were not exposed to sand and grit like bottom-grown mussels.
“In addition, ocean currents provide both nutrients for suspended mussel colonies and a highway for mussel larvae, which drift in the water column until they find a place to attach themselves,” he said. “Our project, along with others conducted nearshore, indicates that the time to grow mussels to market size on longlines is half or less than the natural grow-out period.”
The animals reached harvestable size in 19 months.
Last November, Richard Langan, director of the Cooperative Institute of New England Mariculture and Fisheries at the University of New Hampshire, described his group’s efforts to raise blue mussels in state waters off the Isles of Shoals as highly successful.
The blue mussels are marketed as “Isles of Shoals Supremes, rope-cultured blue mussels from the pristine waters of the Gulf of Maine.”
Langan described the underwater mussel farm as an underwater clothes line using a series of floats and two-ton stone anchors to keep the rig taut and in place.
Maintenance and harvesting can be done by a vessel about the size of a lobster boat, which can be pretty much modified for about $3,000.
The venture is not without concerns. Damage from severe wave action and the impact these systems might have on marine mammals are issues.
Warren Doty, a Chilmark selectman and advocate for this experimental fishery, says the big question everyone’s asking is whether pea crabs will be a problem.
This summer the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group and a small team of fishermen will gather to set up experimental growing stations in town waters to see if a blue mussel culture operation is a viable alternative/supplemental fishery for the local fishing industry. A lot of people will be watching.
Mark Alan Lovewell
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