Indoor Intensive Zero Exchange Shrimp Production

Development of effective marine RAS systems will be beneficial to both large-scale commercial aquaculture, and small farm/niche market aquaculture, since these systems can be employed to raise a wide range of species. In effect, using an RAS type system allows almost any type of culturing environment to be created, since the water is recycled and can be recycled completely only adding water to replace evaporation losses. Our project focus will be to utilize RAS principles to develop a marine shrimp production system that can take advantage of close proximity to major markets. The close proximity will allow a fresh and possibly organic product to be sold at premium prices. This niche market would be the initial focus for a RAS based shrimp system, since the production costs are expected to be higher than those from current pond systems or ex-vessel prices of wild caught shrimp in domestic US waters. Our proposed research effort is to take advantage of the Belize methodology and move it to an indoor application; we will call our system an indoor zero exchange production (IZEP) system. We characterize the Belize system as being one that is dominated by heterotrophic bacteria as opposed to other intensive outdoor or greenhouse systems that are much more dominated by autotrophic organisms, e.g. algae based.