World Aquaculture Magazine - March 2021

16 MARCH 2021 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WA S .ORG I N M E M O R I A M T he aquaculture community was deeply saddened by the passing of Dr. Edward “Ed” Scura, on November 4, 2020, at his Potomac, Maryland home. Ed will be remembered as an aquaculture pioneer, visionary, scientist, entrepreneur, and to many, a friend and mentor. In a pathbreaking career that spanned over 40 years, Ed is widely recognized for making transformative contributions to shrimp farming and for mentoring a literal who’s who in today’s industry. Ed was educated and trained in the sciences. He received a B.S. in Biology and Chemistry fromVillanova University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in marine biology and physiology from the University of Miami in 1972. After graduating fromVillanova, he spent two years in the US Army Medical Corps and later worked his way through graduate school as a hospital medical technician. Ed had an inquisitive and keenly scientific mind and drew on his classical science training to analyze and innovate. An early example of this was for his Ph.D. dissertation on the anoxic physiology of the green sea turtle, for which he had to evaluate blood gases. He overcame the then common problem of high mortality when drawing blood by developing a device and non-lethal technique to draw blood from a turtle’s heart. Ed’s lifelong professional involvement with aquaculture started early-on as he worked on his Ph.D. and was hired as a consultant by Mariculture Ltd., a commercial turtle farm in the Cayman Islands, to improve nutrition and reduce stress, toxicity and disease in captive rearing of Chelonia mydas . From 1972-1974, Ed worked at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (San Diego, California, USA) as a research biologist, studying the accumulation of chlorinated hydrocarbons in the marine food chain. His work is cited in numerous research papers and government advisories. In 1973-1975, he was part of a three-person team contracted by the State of Hawaii to do a feasibility study for an oyster and clam farming project. During this time, he invented a controlled eutrophication mariculture system for growing oysters and clams, and a patent was issued in 1981 for this Bivalve Production Flume. From 1975-1977, Ed worked as a physiologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service in La Jolla, California, researching the nutrition and bioenergetics of larval fish. As a part of this research, he became familiar with coldwater microalgae of the genus Thalassiosira . A few years later in Hawaii, with an algologist colleague, he isolated a warmwater Thalassiosira that was higher in lipids and up to 10× larger in volume per cell than Chaetoceros and which he used with great success as an alternative for Chaetoceros in the larval culture of shrimp. Today Thalassiosira is widely used by shrimp hatcheries worldwide. In the mid-1970s, with two partners and a loan from the State of Hawaii, Ed started Aquatic Farms, Ltd. (AFL). The company was originally a small farm and the first commercial hatchery for freshwater prawns but soon added oysters, penaeid shrimp and tilapia. Aquatic Farms quickly became the epicenter for technology demonstration and project marketing, even receiving attention fromNational Geographic. From the AFL platform, Ed recruited locally and from around the world to assemble a strong technical team and used the AFL facility to further train and develop them. Ed had a keen eye for latent talent, even from unlikely places, and was a catalyst for professional opportunity for many in the industry today. The AFL technical teamwas engaged as consultants by government and corporate clients in the then rapidly developing aquaculture industry, tasked to undertake feasibility studies for projects in Hawaii, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Burma, Pakistan, India and the Philippines. For a large number of these, Ed’s AFL teamwas responsible to build, initially operate and transfer the facility to the owner, as well as to train the new staff. These projects and the technicians trained by AFL and mentored by Ed and others later became the foundation to launch Asian shrimp farming into exponential growth. Ed was an active member of the World Aquaculture Society from its early years and was the 1979 ProgramChairman and a member of the Board of Directors from 1980-1982. He was invited to give the keynote addresses at the sixteenth annual meeting of the World Mariculture Society in Orlando, Florida in 1985, as well as at the nineteenth annual Conference of the World Aquaculture Society in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1988. Ed recognized early on that the shrimp industry needed better technology and many more skilled technicians. In his 1985 keynote address he noted the challenge of skilled technical personnel in a rapidly growing industry: “ I believe that cultured shrimp production will reach 250,000 metric tons by the year 1990. However, since most wild-caught seedstock are fully exploited, this means that hatcheries will have to produce about 16 billion postlarvae annually by 1990 to achieve this goal. If the average-sized hatchery were to produce 50 million postlarvae per year, by 1990 we will require hundreds of new Edward “Ed” Scura (1944-2020) Dr. Ed Scura showing Shrimp Improvement Systems facilities in Islamorada, Florida to visitors in 2007.