World Aquaculture Magazine - March 2021

18 MARCH 2021 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WA S .ORG F red S. Conte, University of California (UC) Cooperative Extension Aquaculture Specialist, passed away on February 19, 2021. Fred was born March 10, 1940 in Houston, Texas to Dr. Raphael and Etta Conte. He met his wife, Elisabeth “Beth” Bailey of Galveston, Texas while she was attending the Texas A&MMarine Lab. They were married shortly after Beth graduated from college in June 1967 and together they raised two sons (Samuel and Mark) and a daughter (Claire). Fred received his B.S. in 1963 in Biology from Lamar State College of Technology, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in 1966 and 1972, in Zoology, and Invertebrate Biology with a Biological Oceanography minor, from Texas A&MUniversity (TAMU), respectively. Fred’s professional career in aquaculture began at TAMU in 1971, where he served as an Extension Mariculture Specialist, covering marine aquaculture. He was involved in building the Corpus Christi, TAMU Shrimp Mariculture Research Facility at the Barney Davis Power Plant, conducted research on shrimp culture and managed the facility. Fred joined the Department of Animal Science, University of California-Davis (UCD) and University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources as California’s first Extension Aquaculture Specialist in 1977. Dr. Conte’s programs covered production technology and governmental issues that impacted both large and small aquaculture enterprises. He extended knowledge and information developed on warmwater and coldwater finfish and shellfish production, including such topics as reproduction, hatchery management, water quality, markets, nutrition, harvest, transport, sanitation, aquatic animal welfare, pond and lake management, farm assistance programs and aquaculture education curriculum development. Recently, he also began providing information about the rapidly growing industry segment of aquaponics. His research and outreach efforts resulted in well-used production manuals and factsheets, podcasts, flash videos and newsletter articles. During his early years, Dr. Conte emphasized writing to extend aquaculture information to clientele. He edited the World Mariculture Society (1978-1980) and the California Aquaculture (1980-1989) newsletters. During the 1990s, Dr. Conte embraced web-based information dissemination to his diverse clientele by developing an aquaculture website as a one-stop location for I N M E M O R I A M Fred Conte (1940-2021) aquaculture information requests. His continuous upgrading of the California Aquaculture website served people around the globe with thousands of visits and downloads from his library of pdf publications every month. He also launched the California Aquaculture Facebook in 2011, as a companion to the website. The Facebook page had an international audience and featured media stores addressing regional, national and international aquaculture- and fisheries-related media coverage. In the early 1980s, California growers and UCD scientists established sturgeon as the newest aquaculture species in the West. Dr. Conte’s significant contribution to this achievement was the production of a manual in 1988 that is still considered to be the gold standard for sturgeon hatcheries nationally and internationally: “The Hatchery Manual for the White Sturgeon, Acipenser transmontanus Richardson, with Application to Other North American Acipenseridae.” He continued to provide outreach for numerous white sturgeon research projects that spanned 40 years at UCD. California is now the largest producer of sturgeon meat and caviar in the U.S. Another major accomplishment of Dr. Conte’s was the initiation of the shellfish sanitation modelling research program at UCD in the 1990s. The development of improved methods of evaluating sanitation conditions in shellfish growing areas in coastal waters was instrumental in opening shellfish sales after rainy weather. Research funded through several Western Regional Aquaculture Center (WRAC) projects resulted in three shellfish sanitation models: “Aquarius” (2009), “Pearl” (2013) and “Mermaid” (2017); and numerous ancillary shellfish software programs used to evaluate and manage shellfish growing areas. These complex and comprehensive models provided more sensitive and accurate analyses of sanitation conditions in shellfish growing areas, especially when making adjustments to rules for opening and closing areas for harvest, thereby improving food safety and reducing unneeded economic hardships on farmers. Throughout his career, Dr. Conte served on numerous department and campus committees, most notably on the Aquaculture and Fisheries Program Executive Committee during its reorganization into the Center for Aquatic Biology and Aquaculture (CABA) and then serving as acting and interim director (1999-2001). He also contributed to classroom instruction as an invited lecturer on various aquaculture topics in the Department’s aquaculture production courses. Dr. Conte was a prominent figure as the UC aquaculture industry