Mercedes Wanguemert, one of Europe’s foremost sea cucumber experts, explains her role in the formation of the continent’s fledgling sea cucumber aquaculture sector and why she believes that the echinoderms have huge untapped potential.
Results from an integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) project with sea cucumbers and marine finfish show that the system is feasible, but practitioners need to refine their designs to ensure the sea cucumbers thrive.
Embracing hapa nets in lieu of tank culture methods can help sea cucumber producers reduce labour costs and give them an economic edge – allowing them to sustainably produce early-juvenile sea cucumbers for grow-out.
The EU’s attempts to diversity its aquaculture production have met decidedly mixed results to date, but aquaculture producers have a number of overlooked, yet impressive, native candidates to contend with.
Mariculture of tropical sea cucumbers is promising, but the nursery rearing of juveniles is a bottleneck for farming and sea ranching. Steven W. Purcell and Natacha S. Agudo conducted four medium-scale experiments lasting 36 weeks, using thousands of cultured …