Shellfish diseases are a concern for shellfish farmers, fishers and resource managers worldwide with many examples of devastating outbreaks and chronic impacts on growth and survival. At the center of the rapidly expanding shellfish aquaculture footprint along the U.S. East Coast is the hatchery production of seed. Interstate seed transfers, crucial for industry growth, are regulated by individual states that typically require testing individual batches of seed for biosecurity. Batch testing expensive, time consuming, and often unnecessarily impedes commerce because shellfish disease s are not contained by nor distributed along state boundaries . All agree that biosecurity is vital, but we can be smarter and more efficient while improving the biosecurity of seed transfers.
The Regional Shellfish Seed Biosecurity Program (RSSBP) was created collaboratively among representatives of the shellfish aquaculture industry, shellfish scientists and pathologists, state regulators and extension personnel. The goal is to use the best available science to minimize risks associated with interstate transfers of bivalve shellfish seed. The RSSBP is comprised of three components accessible via a web portal (www.rssbp.org ):
Details of the RSSBP are presented on our poster. We invite you to explore and query the database at the website listed above for your own purposes and consider providing feedback for improvements or, if applicable, provide data to increase the spatial and temporal coverage of the database. In winter 2020 and 2021, we piloted a Hatchery Compliance Program as part of the RSSBP and the states of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina have already considered these audits and/or the program in requests for shellfish seed importation.